Tools for Working with Regular Expressions
These tools and utilities have regular expressions as the core of their functionality.
- Grep - The utility from the UNIX world that first made regular expressions popular
- PowerGREP - Next generation grep for Microsoft Windows
- RegexBuddy - Learn, create, understand, test, use and save regular expressions. RegexBuddy makes working with regular expressions easier than ever before.
Grep is a tool that originated from the UNIX world during the 1970’s. It can search through files and folders (directories in UNIX) and check which lines in those files match a given regular expression. Grep will output the filenames and the line numbers or the actual lines that matched the regular expression. All in all a very useful tool for locating information stored anywhere on your computer, even (or especially) if you do not really know where to look.
While all of PowerGREP’s functionality is also available from the command line, the key benefit of PowerGREP over the traditional grep is its flexible and convenient graphical interface. Instead of just listing the matching lines, PowerGREP will also highlight the actual matches and make them clickable. When you click on a match, PowerGREP will load the file, with syntax coloring, allowing you to easily inspect the context of a match.
PowerGREP also provides a full-featured multi-line text editor box for composing the regular expression you want to use in your search.
PowerGREP’s regex flavor supports all features of Perl 5, Java and .NET. Only the extensions that only make sense in a programming language are not available. All regex operators explained in the tutorial on this website are available in PowerGREP.
RegexBuddy lays out any regular expression in an easy-to-grasp tree of regex building blocks. RegexBuddy updates the tree as you edit the regular expression. Much easier is to work with the regex tree directly. Delete and move regex building blocks, and add new ones by selecting from clear descriptions. You can get a good overview of complex regular expressions by collapsing grouping and alternation blocks in the tree.
RegexBuddy’s chief designer is Jan Goyvaerts, who also wrote the regex tutorial on this website. The tutorial is included with RegexBuddy, in two formats. The tutorial in RegexBuddy’s help file is always only a click away. Just click the Explain Token button to open the right page in the tutorial. The full tutorial is also included in RegexBuddy’s PDF manual. You can easily print this manual if you prefer to read on paper instead of on the screen.
See more about these tools here.
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