RegExr, An AIR Regular Expression Builder – Free Fridays #14

What could be better on a Friday afternoon that an dose of regular expressions. Anything I hear you cry. Well of course you’re right, but once you’ve mastered them, regular expressions can save you a lot of time and add power functionality to your applications.

Learn Regular Expressions By Experimenting

RegExr is an excellent tool not only for building and checking regular expressions, but also for learning RegEx because it comes a built in supply of standard RegEx.

The application is divided into 3 main areas as seen in the screenshot below.

1. contains the input field for your RegEx, the switches and flags that you can apply and an area containing text where you can see the effects of your RegEx. You can add what ever text you like to the text area so you can build and test your RegEx using relevant text.

2. contains information a breakdown of the information about your regular experssion, this is useful as RegEx are extremely difficult to read and this area parses the RegEx into it’s individual components.

3. this section is the most useful for beginners to this tricky area of programming. This section contains the store of prebuilt RegEx as well as a short explanation of what each one does. YOu can study these and use them as the basis for your own RegEx.

The application was built in Flex by the Canadian Flash developer Grant Skinner and runs on Air so it’ll work on Windows, Mac and Linux. You can download it from gskinner.com/RegExr/desktop

Filed under: Adobe Air, Free Fridays, Free Software , adobe, air, Free Software, grant skinner, regex, regexr, regular expressions