Nick,

My gut tells me that such a tool can only benefit people who are unfamiliar with regexp... maybe just starting out using it.. this is typically a "short" period for a developer (I would imagine anywhere from a week to a month?)...

Those time frames, under certain conditions, may not be "short" at all... but I'm actually using the term "short" relative to the proposed price.

Generally speaking, either you use regexp, or you don't. And if you *do* use regexp, you're likely not to want something that aims to guess them for you... mostly because I feel like the tool only shifts the burden rather than alleviating it... and may well create a greater burden in other areas.

Let me explain:

In cases where the regular expression is in fact non-trivial, a user would have to spend a good amount of time coming up with all the test cases that the tool would need to create the appropriate regexp... leaving you with the task of reviewing the output.

And backreferences would really be a nightmare! :-)

Though I could see some sort of RE Unit Testing solution to be potentially useful... something to keep a collection of test strings to be used against an expression. Find something along the way that breaks it, but shouldn't: add it to the regexp's test list!

Though, $20 is a bit steep for that. :-)

jL

On Apr 2, 2005, at 1:39 PM, 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.

Would people be inclined to pay, say 20 bucks for something like this?

Nick

On Apr 1, 2005, at 6:24 PM, David Lee wrote:

...

I have that installed that but find it quite lacking compared to the built-ins in Komodo, KDevelop and even Eclipse. The interface design is comparatively ill-considered and it just seemed to be slightly ... broken feeling . Maybe its that it's geared up for python regexps and I'm used to perl ones ; maybe its just not 100% yet. In either case I don't use it.

Hopefully it will come along (or something else will).

D

On 02/04/2005, at 9:50 AM, Steve Lianoglou wrote:

...

Just a few posts ago there was some talk about having TextMate do interactive regex testing as part of its features ... I was itching for something similar because I'm coming over from jEdit which has a RegextTester plugin of sorts ... Anyway .. we came across this: http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/13271

Might be helpful.

-steve

I'd pay nothing for something that wrote regexps for me. I'd pay $10-15 for a tool that helped me write them. Such a tool does not become less valuable as you become more competent.

I'd regard any tool which attempts to write regular expressions for me as missing the point.

This is the best I've seen, as part of Komodo's Linux / Windows scripting language IDE:

http://activestate.com/Products/Download/featuretour.plex? id=Komodo&pageid=RxToolkit#

I've just written a ruby script which takes a regex and some match fodder from STDIN and shows - what lines match - what parts are captured to which variable.

Once I extend it to cover replacements as well, I'm going to write it up as a ruby Command for Textmate and see if other people find it useful.

Then I'm going to make it a web based service, and then I'm adding Ajax mojo to it to make it truely interactive. I've needed an Ajax project for rails and decided last night this would be perfect.

To my mind, it's one of those things that you don't need every day, but when you need it it makes the task take fractionally as long.

The UI of whatever I do won't be brilliant compared to a desktop applet, and as Allan regarded this as something best done by a 3rd party tool you might find a way between yourselves to make them work snugly together once you've written something good. Maybe if i get my TM script released within the week (after which I'll no doubt forget about it) you'll get some further feedback from users about the pros / cons / overall usefulness. __ cheers

| )/\vi|)

On 03/04/2005, at 1:22 PM, Eric Hsu wrote:

At 6:37 PM -0500 4/2/05, John Lianogou wrote:

...

Though I could see some sort of RE Unit Testing solution to be potentially useful... something to keep a collection of test strings to be used against an expression. Find something along the way that breaks it, but shouldn't: add it to the regexp's test list!

I would personally prefer a little feature in TM to 'test' a regexp in a particular document. You'd write it and then (either in real-time or not) it would colorize the different pieces that it found on the screen.

My usual workflow when using regexp find/replace is:

1. Write regexp search/replace.
2. Run it and watch it do something really weird.
3. Run it in find mode and see the first thing it matches.
4. Go to 1.
5. ???
6. Profit!

It would be pretty straightforward to write a regexp tester in TM that would take a regexp and color highlight each of the found groupings in different colors in an HTML version of the document. I might do that for myself, now that I think of it, unless someone beats me to it.

best, Eric

Eric Hsu, Assistant Professor of Mathematics San Francisco State University erichsu@math.sfsu.edu http://math.sfsu.edu/hsu ______________________________________________________________________ For new threads USE THIS: textmate@lists.macromates.com (threading gets destroyed and the universe will collapse if you don't) http://lists.macromates.com/mailman/listinfo/textmate

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.