Regular Expressions can be abit of a black art, I remember doing them at university many moons ago and remember being really confused by them. I eventually got into them alot when constructing scripts for a desktop program called Samurize (probably the best program in the world). Its been awhile since I’ve touched them (talking about 3 / 4 years! wow time really does fly!), unfortunately I needed to construct a new one for work to help us with doing some work. It was turning into a really pain to test because it meant check-in the code to the code repository and then running the build, which would take about 10 minutes and then fail.
So after a quick google and a few tries of expression tests I found this one from RegexPlant, which was really simple to use and gave great output to understand what was going on and within a few minutes I’d found the regression expression that worked. So thanks to regexplant for a great testing tooling.
May 26th, 2010
Meant to comment earlier…
As someone training someone in basic regular expressions, that website was very helpful. Sad man I am I dabble in regular expressions constantly as I’m on Linux most of my day — they are so helpful at times.