Regex and non-technical users

Question

Given that:

• You have some Key-Value data that can be modified
• Modification is done via by applying filters to the data. Filters that control what gets changed are created by non-technical people
• The filters are setup using regular expressions. An example of a rule described as part of a filter may be "If a key matches some regex, replace value with some other value"

How would you:

If filters are to be produced by business people, who can't create regular expressions, in what form would you have them submit their input that would be easily translated to regex?

Answer 1

Agent Ransack contains a GUI editor for creating regular expressions from plain English, I would suggest taking a look at that and implementing your own variation of it.

See the screenshot for an example: