Regex love for the masses

You can prove your geek creed by your ability to create a regular expression without any assistance, no online lookups, no quick book checks, no IM’s for a little assistance. I fail miserably. For simple ones I’m pretty good, but anything more than basic pattern checking and regex is way to cryptic for me to quickly rattle it off in my head. Thankfully, for those of us who don’t speak Klingon, there is a great new Regex tool available. Big props to Ryan Swanson and his Regular Expression Explorer.

Before I stumbled across Ryan’s handiwork I used Grant Skinner’s Regex Testing Tool. It was good and extremely helpful, but Ryan really took it to another level. The interface is simple to us. There are a bunch of prebuilt expressions to sample and test with and best of all, there’s a community feature where people can share their regex love.

You can read up about the whole development story here. Better yet, just go try it out. And remember, practice safe Regex.

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