If you are like me you tried to avoid regular expressions and came up with the weirdest excuses in doing so. At first contact regular expressions seemed more like voodoo than programming. I wish I had a tool like The Regulator in those days.
Impressions
The Regulator is the missing link for regular expression development in any modern IDE. It provides a great way to develop, test and manage your regular expression code library.
Let’s look at some features:
- Intellisense – when you sort of know what you want but you don’t know what you need intellisense will pop up with a helpful list of options and explanations for the token at hand. Immensely helpful and dearly missed in other IDEs when working with regular expressions.
- Syntax highlighting – we take this for granted but it is a great help in troubleshooting problematic regular expressions.
- Code generation – automatically generates VB.NET or C# code. It would be nice to have support for other languages but I am feeling spoiled as it is.
- Performance analysis – compare different versions of a regular expression. An amazing feature and as far as I know unique to this tool!
- Community integration - integrates with regexlib.com to search, import and upload regular expressions.
The overall feel is of a professionally written application, well polished and very useful. I just wish Visual Studio would be as good as The Regulator when it comes to regular expressions!
Price
Free.
Conclusion
If you use regular expressions then you must give it a try, 5 stars!
Get The Regulator from here: http://tools.osherove.com/CoolTools/Regulator/tabid/185/Default.aspx
Also make sure to check out the RegExLib site here for many regular expression samples posted by the community: http://regexlib.com/default.aspx
