The extended .NET Regular Expression tester is up on www.RegexLib.com
Hey guys, figured I'd ping everyone and tell them this little jewel was out and ready to go. You can test your expressions any time you have an internet connection and use some extended features like source from file/web. I have to say the tool is more and more functional every day as new options are being added. Here is a quick overview of the current options:
- Client or Server Side Testing - Test against the .NET engine or the browser vb/jscript implementations.
- Some new buttons allow you to quickly add your current pattern to the repository on RegexLib or go grab some existing expressions.
- You can now specify all of the capturing options for the expression right up front.
- The source for an expression can be retrieved for you by an external data source.
- Selecting groups and captures in the results window will result in the item captured in the source being highlighted.
- And the same asynchronous runner is being used so those runaway expressions won't have you waiting hours for a return, instead they'll conk out after only a few prolonged seconds.
Some of the options that have been tossed back and forth include:
- Formalize the tab structure to include documentation, display options, and more. That middle documentation panel is like a window into another universe and we want to make sure the other universe is full of great information.
- I've tossed my hand in to include nested groups as nested items in the tree structure... The flat layout of group numbers doesn't portray this, but the offset+length values do give you an idea of where groups are in the hierarchy.
- I'm hoping to translate some C# code to aid with screen scraping into JScript so the functions can generate expressions on the client-side. The basic premise is that by feeding some source value, and then tagging all of the ranges you can more easily design a range by telling the code what type of data will be present so it can create an appropriate pattern for that portion. This doesn't work on extremely dynamic patterns, such as date-times, etc... But it would allow you to work on something simpler, especially the not-so-complex layout of a table row within an HTML page.
Go check it out: http://www.regexlib.com/RETester.aspx, and make sure to give plenty of feedback on issues. I guess there were a ton last night, but I'm seeing that everything I've tested today works well.