Regular Expression Generator

by jmonegro • 17 years ago

58 15 17 years ago

geuis• 17 years ago

Interface needs to be cleaned up alot. I think this is closer to the kinds of regex generator I want but this interface is clumsy and confusing.

Batsu• 17 years ago

I think a little bit of javascript could go a long way into making it very handy.

pjdavis• 17 years ago

JESUS CHRIST! That's more confusing than trying to figure out the regex on your own.

_giu• 17 years ago

your words match exactly what I was going to write

wglb• 17 years ago

So now the programmer has THREE problems.

dasil003• 17 years ago

Yes, but it's ostensibly more fun to figure out.

Sujan• 17 years ago

The interface sucks, but the tool is magnificent. Pure love!

mds• 17 years ago

Take a look at the "extract fields" feature in Splunk for an example of a much nicer interface for this kind of thing, although Splunk tends to make really ugly regexes.

luckyland• 17 years ago

the console app http://txt2regex.sourceforge.net/ is -way- nicer to handle

pj• 17 years ago

I like it. The interface is clunky, but it's text based, so that's okay. Really, what a great tool. Regex expressions can be a real pain to build.

I think a lot of the comments are being overly critical. To take something as complicated to build as a regex and put a web interface on it is actually an amazing feat.

I would like to see the strings it generates as a single length of text, rather than concatenated variables. Of course I could do this myself, but it'll save countless minutes on all the programmers who use the tool, because ultimately, that's what they are going to do.

Sam_Odio• 17 years ago

This has been submitted/discussed on HN before: http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-us&...

I'm not complaining. It's probably worth the resubmit. I've used the site several times since originally it on HN.

seldo• 17 years ago

Can somebody explain to me how this manages to create regexes not confused by false positives? Like if you select a string that must be at the beginning of the input, it doesn't seem to enforce that.

pilif• 17 years ago

For many of the cases I was able to come up with (and express in this horrible, horrible interface), I was able to come up with much more concise and thus readable expressions that match the same thing.

Regexpes are very hard to read anyways, so please let's not use tools that make this even harder.

Tichy• 17 years ago

Apart from the fact that it has been posted on HN an estimated 1000 times before, I find it strange that it does not even give you the actual RegExp. Instead it shows you the code that will generate the RegExp.

silentbicycle• 17 years ago

If you use Emacs, check out M-x re-builder .

Regular Expression Generator

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