I tried the regulator 2 weeks ago to construct/test some regexp's for my parser (the lex part) and found it useful for testing regexp's. I however had a hard time understanding the app.
What does that analyzer window do for example? Is it able to construct a regexp out of a serie of matching strings?
Some issues:
- maximized state isn't preserved
- when you drag the window with the search results to the middle pane to get it more horizontally (so you can actually read the descriptions) the windows already in the middle pane are not resizing, but just move up, scrolling out of the window (at least in maximized state. I'm not sure if you use magic lib.
- the intellisense is indeed very hard to deal with. It's also not that useful. What's far more useful is tiny wizards, like a 1, 2, 3 step wizard which walks you through the creation of a pattern by asking you a couple of questions.
- the search pane is useless at this point, as the text in the grid isn't wrapping. So you can't read the descriptions specified for a regexp, and you can't drag the row's height bigger :)
- The initial setup of the windows isn't that great. The regexps typed in are usually not spanning more than 5 or 6 lines. However the testing strings can be quite large as well as the list of matches. When the window is enlarged, those windows aren't resized automatically, but the text window is.
- The splashscreen doesn't center in the screen :)
That's it for now :) The testing purposes were great. It would have been better though (but this isn't your fault, as regexp language syntax is retarted big time) if the tool helped more in creating the regexp that I wanted. For example, I was searching for a way to match these kind of strings: (with quotes!)
"foo"
"foo, bar"
"foo,bar"
It turned out that "([\S ]|[\S ],|[\S ], )+" would do the trick. But this required a lot of trial and error...
But perhaps it's the quirkyness of regexps in general, I think it will be hard to create a tool which can convert semantical input into a regexp.
Thanks for the great input Frans. I'll see what I can do to make it better.