Tools

Visual regular expression tester

Download: Larch regex tester JAR (v0.1.2-alpha)

Regular expressions can be a pain; large reg-exes can be difficult to understand as their structure is obscured by tricky syntax.

The Larch visual regular expression tester displays them in a visual — and editable — form. Visual elements are used to highlight the structure of the regex while retaining their syntax, thereby retaining compatibility with other software. Instead of:

[A-Za-z_][A-Za-z0-9_]*(\s*(\+|-|\*|/)\s*[A-Za-z_][A-Za-z0-9_]*)+

We see:

Just below the visual regular expression is a text area that highlights segments matched by the regex. It updates interactively, after each edit: