Digital Prank

Regular Expressions are very important part of computing in any programming language and is largely used in web programming these days. Last month I wrote an article for practicing regular expressions in real-time which talks about RegExr which is a free online as well as desktop tool to edit and test Regular Expressions in real-time. Today I am going to introduce you to one more regular expression tool called Regex Coach developed using Lisp which helps one to learn regular expressions interactively.

Regex Coach is written using LISP only for Windows and the tool is Perl-compatible. This tool is very light weight and I prefer this tool over RegExr because of the step by step debugging of regular expression as shown in the picture above. Please find the features of this tool below,

• It shows whether a regular expression matches a particular target string.
• It can also show which parts of the target string correspond to captured register groups or to arbitrary parts of the regular expression.
• It can "walk" through the target string one match at a time.
• It can simulate Perl’s split and s/// (substitution) operators.
• It tries to describe the regular expression in plain English.
• It can show a graphical representation of the regular expression’s parse tree.
• It can single-step through the matching process as performed by the regex engine.
• Everything happens in "real time", i.e. as soon as you make a change somewhere in the application all other parts are instantly updated