Regex-tool for Emacs
Saturday, November 3, 2007
I use
regular expressions when I need to, but not frequently enough that
I can construct complex regex strings without a bit of trial and
error. When I used to use Windows (yuck, petuweee ;-) ), I would use
Edi Weitz's excellent
Regex Coach to help out. However, when I moved over to Mac OS X,
that ceased to be an option (Edi doesn't provide a Mac version of his
utility). So, for most of my regex stuff, I just used
the
rexexp-builder function that comes with later
versions of Emacs. However, recently John Wiegley
announced that he had written
regex-tool.el, an Emacs library that provides a similar UI to
Edi's tool. I had a play with it and found it really convenient for
constructing regular expressions:
It supports both Emacs-style and Perl-style regular expressions. It
isn't anywhere as featureful as Edi's utility; however, it is still
quite a useful tool. The whole program is only 181 lines long
(including comments and blank lines!). Very nice!
