Is there some good visual regular expression editor? [closed]

Question

I have learned the basics about basic Regex, but I still feel I am far from being good.

As a beginner, it will be fantastic to have a WYSIWYG editor. So I was wondering if someone can give some recommendation on such editors? For various commonly-used versions of Regex, such as the basic one, the one for Python, for Perl, for bash, ....

Or if you have other nice ways/tools (not necessarily in the form of editor) to recommend for helping master different versions of Regex, that will be nice as well!

Thanks and regards!

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MY OSes are Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows 7.

Answer 1

What is "good" depends on what is most useful to you. For me, though, these are the key features for a good regex editor (besides the ability to test and create regular expressions, of course, which is a prerequisite to be called a "regex editor" :-) :

1. Displays matches hierarchically with captured groups.
2. Explains/analyzes an entered regex in plain English, showing a hierarchical tree.
3. Translates your regex into code for a language of your choice.

RegexBuddy, as @Max mentioned, does all these but there is also a free alternative, Expresso that also does them very well. These two utilities are the only ones I have found with the crucial ability to explain a regex. Here is an example from RegexBuddy:

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Answer 2

I think you will find www.debuggex.com very valuable. Some advantages of debuggex are:

• Feedback is in real-time, so you can understand what's happening faster
• The ability to answer the question "Why does/doesn't it match here?" for any position in your text.
• Very heavy on the visuals, it was a core design decision behind it's creation

At the time of writing, it only supports Javascript. However, more languages are planned for the future.