[TxMt] RegEx Tool

[John Lianogou]

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