I’ve updated my regular expression tester, this version includes:

• saving your regular expressions into a shared object;
• setting the regular expression flags
• some minor bugfixes
• a bit more style added

update 15-01-2008:

Version 1.1 released:

• the save function now also saves the string to match and the replace string

update 04-03-2008

Version 1.2 released:

• New style, because the black style was giving problems with selecting text (black selection box on a black background, not good!)
• Syntax highlight! When you hover over your expression you’ll see what the different parts of your expression mean!
  • When you click (to edit) the expression, highlighting is turned off, allowing you to make selections. To turn it back on click outside of the textfield and start hovering.

You can find it at http://www.idsklijnsma.nl/regexps/

An AIR version will follow soon!

For the past 2 hours I’ve been struggling with the regular expression engine of AS3. Normally, when I need to write an regexp, I test it in the Regular Expression Workbench, a .NET app which is quite handy. The problem however is that it uses the .NET syntax for regexes. Apparently, each programming language uses it’s own regular expression syntax. For example, in .NET you can create a named group using (?<groupname>), in AS3 you need to type (?P<groupname>). more…