On 02-04-2005 20:39, Nick Hristov wrote:
I have had an idea of building a professional reg-ex builder tool for a while, but I was not sure how large the user base will be.
What I had in mind was a tool that will allow the user to select multiple bundles of text and the application would extrapolate a regular expression based on the selections made by the user.
You might want to reconsider starting this: It is not trivial to extract a usable regexp from things a user selects. There are several ways to create regexps for matches, depending on what the user wants and it can become a real burden for the user to get clear cases from which the tool can extract regexps.
Learning regexps is not easy, but once you grasp the concept, they become a very powerful tool, which allows you to save lots of time... A preview tool might be better indeed, but I would certainly not be willing to pay $20 for something like that..
Jeroen.