This is free give-away, so relax.
I don't know if it was laziness, but I found that working with Regular Expressions could be taxing.
Not because it is hard (not that it is easy), but you always need an expression when you're in the middle of solving
some problem unrelated to cryptic patterns, and could not spare the mental energy or time to craft just the right pattern.
So from time to irregular time, I thought it would be great just to have a place where I could easily put all of the "Regular" expressions I fished off the internet or wherever.
Imagine retiring at night, hearing yourself saying, "Man, wont it be nice if I could
create a tool to just find the right expression or something close to
the right one, un-tuck-it-away, change it, test it, and tuck safely it right back into
wherever until some next time when I was on another a hurried, lazy, forgetful
mission?
And so it came to pass, that this idea came to me. Luckily, when it passed I was still in a
hurry, so I did this little quicky to achieve one thing only: Save tested and proven
Regular Expression patterns, so I could recall them later.
Other, more
exotic, genius Regex programs - by smarter programmers - require time to learn,
and have enough features
you can play with until you learn Regex like the back of your hand.
But you might find that they offer you a free trial for a while. That is not how this one works. This is
a genuine, free download, with no strings. |
RegexSaver is a tiny utility that takes a
Regular Expression pattern, some text to be tested, and a user-provided name. You click a button to test your expression, and, if it matches your pattern you can
click another button to write your updated list of Regular Expressions to file.
With RegexSaver, you get a 3-TextBox workbench and a DataGrid workshelf. On the workbench part of the UI, there are convenient copy and paste buttons that talk to your Clipboard, and indicator buttons that light up to show what you did and what you might do next. If you wish, you can save
-- to your 'workshelf', or list; and eventually to file --
any pattern that tests as successful match.
And this is how it works: You enter a pattern, and some text to test. If your pattern is
really way out of sytactic wack, it throws a little fit into a message box. Otherwise it tells you if your pattern and text matched,
or failed: as in bool Regex.IsMatch(string pattern, string text)
and, if you would be nice to the program and provide a name for it,
RegexSaver signals that you can
save the entry.
Saving is a two-stage process. First it saves to the list, shown in the DataGrid.
There you get to select any item in the grid, thereby filling the pattern and the name
text boxes. You can also delete any item that you grow tired of.
Then, from
there you can permanently commit, or "Write to file", what's left of the list,
in XML format.
The file, RegexSavings.regxml, is automatically reloaded
when RegexSaver restarts, giving you access to the deeds of your past.
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Some day when I get around to it, I will probably provide a utility whereby RegexSaver can beam one programmer's goldmine of saved Regular Expressions to another programmer on the far side of
Planet Jupiter.
But for now, most programmers will know how open the XML file in
Notepad and merge it with some other programmer's shared treasure
chest of Regex nuggets sent by XML mail.
And some day before that, I will probably facilitate saving the patterns under a user
provided filenames, if anyone should care.
In the meantime, if you ask nicely, I will probably just email you the source code, so you can take it where no Regex Expression
tool has gone before. And may the force be with you.
And now, <drum roll> your reward for reading all of this crap is to tell us 2 things, then download RegexSaver:
Immediately upon installation it will run. After that, look for an entry in Start | All Programs | Imagineered Systems Solutions Incorporated | RegexSaver.
Finally, if one day you decide you have had enough, you can remove it by going to
Control Panel | Add or Remove Programs and dump it. |