How do you write and test your regular expressions?

Question

Is their any wizards or tools to create and test regular expressions for PHP, because it is so difficult :( ? thanks :)

Answer 1

RegexBuddy is a widely popular app for this purpose. It also costs $40 and only runs on Windows.

For powerful free alternatives, see this answer.

Answer 2

reAnimator is a nice tool to visualize your regex as a state machine- I find it useful sometimes.

Python also allows you to view a regex parse tree, which can be helpful if you learn to read it.