Expresso Regular Expression Tool __TOP_

The award-winning Expresso editor is equally suitable as a teaching tool for the beginning user of regular expressions or as a full-featured development environment for the experienced programmer or web designer with an extensive knowledge of regular expressions.

The .NET framework provides a powerful class Regex for creating and using Regular Expressions. While regular expressions are a powerful way to parse, edit, and replace text, the complex syntax makes them hard to understand and prone to errors, even for the experienced user. When developing code that uses regular expressions, I have found it very helpful to create and debug my expressions in a separate tool to avoid time consuming compile/debug cycles. Expresso enables me to do the following:

Expresso Regular Expression Tool Download

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to list all of the files with the exe extension. Here the asterisk is a wildcard that matches any character string and the period is a literal that matches only a period. For decades, much more complex systems have been used to great advantage whenever it is necessary to search text for complex patterns in order to extract or edit parts of that text. The .NET framework provides a class called Regex that can be used to do search and replace operations using regular expressions. In .NET, for example, suppose we want to find all the words in a text string. The expression \w will match any alphanumeric character (and also the underscore). The asterisk character can be appended to \w to match an arbitrary number of repetitions of \w, thus \w* matches all words of arbitrary length that include only alphanumeric characters (and underscores).

Expresso provides a toolbox with which one can build regular expressions using a set of tab pages from which any of the syntactical elements can be selected. After building an expression, sample data can be read or entered manually, and the regular expression can be run against that data. The results of the search are then displayed, showing the hierarchy of named groups that Regex supports. The tool also allows testing of replacement strings and generation of code to be inserted directly into a C# or Visual Basic .NET program.

The purpose of this article is not to give a tutorial on the use of regular expressions, but rather to provide a tool for both experienced and novice users of regular expressions. Much of the complex behavior of regular expressions can be learned by experimenting with Expresso.

To use Expresso, download and run the executable file, which requires the .NET Framework. If you want to explore the code, download and extract the source files, open the solution within Visual Studio .NET, then compile and run the program. Expresso will start with sample data preloaded into the "Input Data" box (refer to the figure above). Create your own regular expression or select one of the examples from the list box. Click "Find Matches" to test the regular expression. The matches are shown in a tree structure in the "Results" box. Multiple groups and captures can be displayed by expanding the plus sign as shown above.

In this example, the expression \P{IsGreek}{4,7}? has been generated by setting options that specify: match strings of four to seven characters, but with as few repetitions as possible, of any characters other than Greek letters. By clicking the "Insert" button, this expression will be inserted into the regular expression that is being constructed in the text box that contains the regular expression that will be used by the "FindMatch" or "Replace" buttons. Using the other tab pages, all of the syntactical elements of .NET regular expressions can be tested.

Replacement strings may be built using the various expressions found on the "Substitutions" tab. To test a replacement pattern, enter a regular expression, a replacement string, some input data, and then click the "Replace" button. The output will be shown in the "Results" box.

Once a regular expression has been thoroughly debugged, code can be generated by selecting the appropriate option in the "Code" menu. For example, to generate code for a regular expression to find dates, create the following regular expression (or select this example from the drop down list):

By selecting the "Make C# Code" from the "Code" menu, the following code is generated. It can be saved to a file or cut and pasted into a C# program to create a Regex object that encapsulates this particular regular expression. Note that the regular expression itself and all the selected options are built into the constructor for the new object:

After creating this tool, I discovered the Regex Workbench by Eric Gunnerson, which was designed for the same purpose. Expresso provides more help in building expressions and gives a more readable display of matches (in my humble opinion), but Eric's tool has a nice feature that shows Tooltips that decode the meaning of subexpressions within an expression. If you are serious about regular expressions, try both of these tools!

You may find it a little odd that a hack who grew up using a language with the ain't keyword would fall so head over heels in love with something as obtuse and arcane as regular expressions. I'm not sure how that works. But it does. Regular expressions rock.They should absolutely be a key part of every modern coder's toolkit.

The quote is from Jamie Zawinski, a world class hacker who I admire greatly. If he's telling us not to use regular expressions, should we even bother? Maybe, if you live and die by soundbites. But there's a bit more to the story than that, as evidenced by Jeffrey Friedl's exhaustive research on the Zawinski quote. Zawinski himself commented on it. Analyzing the full text of Jamie's posts in the original 1997 thread, we find the following:

The first quote is too glib to be taken seriously. But this, I completely agree with. Here's the point Jamie was trying to make: not that regular expressions are evil, per se, but that overuse of regular expressions is evil.

But wait! Let me guess! The last time you had to read a regular expression and figure it out, your head nearly exploded! Why, it wasn't even code; it was just a bunch of unintelligible Q*Bert line noise!

Let me be very clear on this point: If you read an incredibly complex, impossible to decipher regular expression in your codebase, they did it wrong. If you write regular expressions that are difficult to read into your codebase, you are doing it wrong.

Look. Writing so that people can understand you is hard. I don't care if it's code, English, regular expressions, or Klingon. Whatever it is, I can show you an example of someone who has written something that is pretty much indistinguishable from gibberish in it. I can also show you something written in the very same medium that is so beautiful it will make your eyes water. So the argument that regular expressions are somehow fundamentally impossible to write or read, to me, holds no water. Like everything else, it just takes a modicum of skill.

Buck up, soldier. Even Ruby code is hard to read until you learn the symbols and keywords that make up the language. If you can learn to read code in whatever your language of choice is, you can absolutely handle reading a few regular expressions. It's just not that difficult. I won't bore you with a complete explanation of the dozen or so basic elements of regular expressions; Mike already covered this ground better than I can:

I'd like to illustrate with an actual example, a regular expression I recently wrote to strip out dangerous HTML from input. This is extracted from the SanitizeHtml routine I posted on RefactorMyCode.

What do you see here? The variable name whitelist is a strong hint. One thing I like about regular expressions is that they generally look like what they're matching. You see a list of HTML tags, right? Maybe with and without their closing tags?

Honestly, is this so hard to understand? To me it's perfectly readable. But we can do better. In most modern regex dialects, you can flip on a mode where whitespace is no longer significant. This frees you up to use whitespace and comments in your regular expression, like so.

But how did I cook up this regular expression? How do I know it does what I think it does? How do I test it? Well, again, I do that the same way I do with all my other code: I use a tool. My tool of choice is RegexBuddy.

RegexBuddy is far and away the best regex tool on the market in my estimation. Nothing else even comes close. But it does cost money. If you don't use software that costs money, there are plenty of alternatives out there. You wouldn't read or write code in notepad, right? Then why in the world would you attempt to read or write regular expressions that way? Before you complain how hard regular expressions are to deal with, get the right tools!

This trouble is worth it, because regular expressions are incredibly powerful and succinct. How powerful? I was able to write a no-nonsense, special purpose HTML sanitizer in about 25 lines of code and four regular expressions. Compare that with a general purpose HTML sanitizer which would take hundreds if not thousands of lines of procedural code to do the same thing.

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" :-) :

Kodos is an application to aid in the creation and debugging of regular expressions in python. The GUI for Kodos should eliminate the need for using the python interpreter for regex design in most instances. 9af72c28ce