Does anyone know of a good visual regular expression builder? I'm playing around with some shell scripting and awk at work, and I've been using www.rubular.com to help...
I like the visualization at http://www.regexper.com -- it gives you a "railroad diagram" of what your regexp means. Just type your regular expression into the text field and press Return. One of the problems with regexps is that there are so many to choose from. There are three major branches: basic (like in grep), extended (egrep, awk), and PCRE (perl, ruby).
Nohbudy replied:
I've played with "Kiki" available in the Ubuntu repos, it does the job and is pretty simple. But normally I just use a service like http://www.regextester.com/ or whatever shows up first on google. Side note, if you have some tricky regex or things work some places but not others. I've noticed signifigant changes in small version numbers. I wrote a Youtube link regex for a PHP site a little while ago, I had it working in my test enviroment, but the production server ran a single version lower that didn't include some key elements totally breaking everything. I was chasing my tail trying to figure out what happened, before digging into old documentation and discovering the issue.
roknir replied:
I like RegEx Buddy, but here's a web-based one: [RegEx Hero](http://regexhero.net/tester/)
sprashoo replied:
Being able to use regexes effectively means understanding the syntax, not using a GUI tool.