being that regex is one of those things i always always have to relearn every time i need it. one of the must useful tools features are the ones that not only give you the match results but the human readable | understandable explanation of your regex parts
Agreed, at some point with some categories I admit in the post that I'm just collecting and reviewing tools, RegEx ones are a good example, for fun. Other times two or three tools exist because there is a specific gap in one filled by another.
The thing that gets me is remembering the slightly different rules for the various regex engines. Like which ones support which operators, which operators need to be escaped, etc.
I've used that and regexbuddy and others over the years. Almost anything the gives you some visual rendering of what's going on is helpful. Personally, I've taken to using the regex stuff in the Jetbrains IDEs, mostly because I'm there already most of the time, and it's 'good enough'. But I'm not always at my own setup, and regexr and similar are always a good tool to have (and to share with others to show them how a regex is working).
If I did this all the time, I might not need tools like this. But complex regex are something I only dive in to a handful of times per year, and it's never the same problem twice.
A tool that could provide example inputs for Regex could be really useful. Especially if it could also provide similar examples inputs where it doesn't match and evaluate edge cases.
It takes some time to read a RegEx, but I find them quite useful because the alternative would be a bunch of if statements, splits, looping and whatever just to do a match on a string. It's very neat and concise!
True. I was thinking about a tool that would give you a list of regexes, ranked by some factor that aims to get at the regex pattern that'll be useful. For example, if I gave it, [name@email.com, name2@something.com] it would give all kinds of regex patterns, but ideally point to [a-z]@[a-z].com
I think this is really valuable. Just today I had a non-tech co-worker who needed to understand Regex for some tool we were using. I did the regex for him and (very briefly) explained it. Now this might be something he can more easily grok and use a translator (+ regex101.com to verify) to create more complex regex's he might end up needing.
The fact that there are so many different peculiarities in different regex systems has always raised the hairs on the back of my neck. As in when a tool accepts a regex and I have to a trawl the manual to find out exactly what regex is acceptable to it.
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