Regular expressions will always be somewhat mysterious, even to the most skilled of programmers. There’s no shame in using a regex tester to fine-tune your queries and one of the top online debuggers, Regular Expressions 101, has just been revamped with a slick interface and more functionality.
The new site caters for several popular web languages, including PHP, Javascript, Python and even Golang. Unfortunately for .NET aficionados, the site currently doesn’t support Microsoft’s flavour of regex and the creator has said it’s unlikely it ever will.
Regular expressions are evaluated live, so no need to hit a submit button to see the results. Errors are also shown immediately, along with an explanation to help diagnose the problem. A quick-reference box in the bottom-right corner provides fast access to common commands and tokens.
Finally, you can save expressions as short URLs, making them easy to share with others.
The revamp still has a few kinks to iron out; if you discover any, you can post them to the site’s GitHub repository. Note that the repo doesn’t contain any source code — it’s only used for issue tracking.
Regular Expressions 101 [Official site, via Reddit]
Comments