Regex Hero Blog

Regex Hero Super Speed, Super Intelligence, and Ultimate

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wortham) — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 15:25:00 +0000

Last week version 2.0 of Regex Hero landed in the Microsoft Store.

What's new in Regex Hero 2.0?
You can still use the basic functionality of Regex Hero for free. But there are now 3 paid products within Regex Hero:
Super Speed Pack: Benchmarking and regex performance recommendations.
Super Intelligence Pack: Local saving and regex explanations.
Ultimate: Contains all features of Super Speed and Super Intelligence Packs.

I hope you enjoy these new features.

Benchmarking and Local Saving Coming Soon

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wortham) — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 20:25:00 +0000

Those who used the old Silverlight version of Regex Hero will remember that it once had a benchmarking feature and the ability to save your regular expressions to your local computer. Well, both of those features are coming back and will be available in a Standard version that will be sold in the Microsoft Store.

Here's a preview of what the two features will look like:

Stay tuned for updates. The new Regex Hero Standard version will be available for purchase very soon. A couple months after that you can expect to see Regex Hero Professional become available with even more advanced features.

Regex Hero is now available in the Microsoft Store!

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wortham) — Sat, 21 May 2022 19:59:00 +0000

I just released a free version of Regex Hero to the Microsoft Store. This version replaces the old Silverlight version. You can check it now. If you find any bugs be sure to let me know.

This free version includes the following features:

Real-time highlighting of regex matches.
Match, Replace, and Split modes.
Code completion for regular expressions.
.NET code generation.
Complete .NET regex reference.
(New) Automatically terminates long-running regular expressions and allows you to run them manually with a button press.

Requirements:

Windows 10 (version 1809 or later)
Windows 11 (any version)

Right now you can only download it by visiting the link but soon it'll be searchable within the Microsoft Store. And the current plan is to later release a Standard and Professional version with some of the more advanced features just as Regex Hero used to have. Eventually, if .NET MAUI is as good as initial reports would suggest I may be able to create a version that runs on the Mac as well.

Regex Hero for Windows 10 is Underway

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wortham) — Mon, 11 Feb 2019 21:07:00 +0000

Awhile back I began working on an HTML5 / JavaScript version of Regex Hero. However, it was a huge undertaking essentially requiring a complete rewrite of the entire application. I have not had enough time to dedicate to this lately.

So I've begun again, this time rewriting Regex Hero to work in WPF. It'll be usable in Windows 10 and downloadable from the Microsoft Store. This is a much easier task that also has the advantage of running the .NET regex library from the application itself. This will allow for the same speedy experience of testing your regular expressions and getting instant feedback that Regex Hero users have always enjoyed. I expect the first release to be ready in Q4 of 2019.

Regex Hero Professional is Now Free

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wortham) — Sat, 08 Jul 2017 18:34:00 +0000

Regex Hero is now completely free!

I've been working on this tool off and on for the past 8 years. I spent a lot of time making it very powerful and easy for developers to create efficient regular expressions. Throughout most of this time it's been a paid product. However, with the added pressure of other free tools out there getting better all the time, I've finally decided to make Regex Hero free as well. Enjoy!

Try Regex Hero at http://regexhero.net/tester/

Installer for Desktop version of Regex Hero

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wortham) — Sun, 12 Mar 2017 18:52:00 +0000

As Firefox just dropped support for Silverlight I really needed a solution for Regex Hero. So I created an installer for it. It's still Silverlight, but by using the installer you can install it directly to your computer and never need to open it in a browser.

If you visit regexhero.net/tester and don't have a browser that supports Silverlight (IE is the only one left), then you'll see download links for 64-bit and 32-bit versions of the installer.

When you install it you'll see a link over on the right hand side that says "Activate Regex Hero". This process connects your desktop version of Regex Hero with your online account. So if you're a licensed user this is how you'll gain access to all of those licensed features.

Note: Currently there will be a security warning when you try to run either one of these installers. I'm in the process of obtaining a code signing certificate and will update them as soon as possible.

You may be wondering about the status of the HTML5 version of Regex Hero. My previous post more than a year ago was about my development of this version. I may still finish this at some point but I've been too busy lately to work on it. In any case, at least the installer allows a way to bypass all the browser issues.

Update (May 21, 2022):

This installable version is no longer available. But Regex Hero is available now in the Microsoft Store.

Upcoming HTML5 / JavaScript Version of Regex Hero

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wortham) — Fri, 07 Aug 2015 21:18:00 +0000

In the next few months I'll be working on a JavaScript version of Regex Hero. The need to do this comes from the fact that Chrome has dropped support for Silverlight. It's also not supported by the new Microsoft Edge web browser. So the pressure is mounting.

Forgive me for not doing something about this sooner. I've had a very busy and exciting year. Recently I moved to a new city and just a few weeks ago I got married. Nonetheless, my plans are to make Regex Hero better than ever and usable on more browsers and devices than ever.

Fortunately, there now exists Javascript libraries that'll emulate the .NET framework (even the .NET Regex Class library). The Regex Class library is the main thing I really need to build Regex Hero in JavaScript. JavaScript wasn't an option 6 years ago when I first built Regex Hero in Silverlight. But now that it is, I'm excited about it. I will post updates on this blog as the new development progresses.

Login System Upgrades Are Coming

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wortham) — Tue, 10 Mar 2015 16:16:00 +0000

Windows Live Login

A couple of customers have pointed out recently that the Windows Live Login on Regex Hero prompts you for access to your contacts. This wasn't intentional. I'm not actually using this contact information for anything. The code literally doesn't touch it. This will be addressed soon so you won't even see that prompt.

Google OpenID

The Google login I'm using is being phased out for an OpenAuth replacement. I will be interfacing with the new system soon. And the upgrade will be seamless for existing Google users.

New Username and Password

I've thought about this one for awhile. I would like to have the option for a username and password on the site. I was a relatively early adopter of OpenID back in 2009. And back then good standard login interfaces hadn't yet surfaced. Nowadays it's most common to see just a few options: Login with Google, Facebook, or Username and Password. Obviously I can't get rid of options that users are actually using. So Windows Live, Twitter, etc will not be going away. But at least I can add the username and password option.

Refining Regex Recommendations

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wortham) — Sun, 27 Apr 2014 21:04:00 +0000

100% Accuracy

Today I built an automated test so I can verify that the new regex recommendations engine is producing valid recommendations. In other words, I want to make sure that all of the recommended changes coming out of it do not affect the text that your regular expression matches. So I'm running the engine on about 2,000 regular expressions and target strings to verify its accuracy. I found a couple mistakes it was making and today's update takes care of that so we're up to 100% accuracy.

Other recommendations

I'm still working on making this feature better. And as I continue to expand on this functionality I want to also establish a concept of confidence with the recommendation engine. Thanks to today's test, I have 100% confidence in the recommendations that are in Regex Hero Professional today.

But there are other recommendations I want to create that I couldn't possibly have such confidence in. For instance, there's the issue of capturing groups vs non-capturing groups. It's a very common mistake to see a regular expression with capturing groups, and yet the captured values are never used for anything. Non-capturing groups are significantly faster and should be used instead in this scenario. But there's no way of me knowing how you're going to use the regular expression, so I can't recommend non-capturing groups with 100% confidence. So I need to create a new type of recommendation that appears differently in Regex Hero to cover scenarios like this. Look for this and more recommendations coming soon.

Regex Performance Recommendation Engine

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wortham) — Sun, 20 Apr 2014 21:27:00 +0000

This feature has been in the works for awhile now. I released a beta version of it a couple weeks ago. But today it's all grown up and available to users of Regex Hero Professional.

It essentially analyzes your regular expression, finds common mistakes, and suggests performance improvements that won't affect your matching results. I just created a demo video of the new Performance Recommendations Feature in action.

Fixed Bugs With Saving Locally, The Analyzer, And a New Recommendation Engine

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wortham) — Sat, 05 Apr 2014 21:43:00 +0000

Bug Fixes

Today's update takes care of a couple bugs:

Saving locally to your computer with Regex Hero Professional would fail with certain special characters.
The analyzer would fail in rare situations involving very complex character classes.

Recommendation Engine

And lastly, I've included a beta version of a new recommendation engine. This is available only to users of Regex Hero Professional. The recommendations that are produced are all related to performance. And the type of recommendations that are produced are limited at this point. Often you'll see the message, "No recommendations found." This is something I intend to continue to work on and improve in the upcoming months.

Here are the possible recommendations I've included so far:

IgnoreCase is not needed and slows down processing. Please disable it. This one determines when the IgnoreCase flag isn't doing anything for you. For example, \w matches word characters and it's case insensitive, so adding the IgnoreCase just for that would be pointless and would slow down the regular expression.
Redundant quantifiers may be slow. Please remove the first quantifier. This identifies situations such as x+x+. The '+' quantifier used back to back on the same character does nothing but make the regular expression much slower than it should be. This can be simplified to xx+.
Alternations are slow. Please change to a character class. This identifies single character alternations such as a|b|c. It is slightly more efficient to use [abc] instead.
Do not repeat 3 or more characters. Use a numbered quantifier instead. This is a minor one, but rather than \w\w\w you can use \w{3} and see slightly improved performance. The performance gains are greater the more characters you're dealing with.
Do not perform case insensitive matching with a character class. Use the IgnoreCase option instead. In some old regex implementations, there was no IgnoreCase flag. So the workaround would be to explicitly include both cases, e.g. [Aa][Bb][Cc]. But there's no need for that anymore, and it's more efficient to just use the IgnoreCase option.

There will be more rules coming, as well as improvements to the intelligence and guidance behind these existing rules. But the big feature to come next is to actually allow you to simply click a button to fix the problem.

Groups, Delimiters, and Code Generation

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wortham) — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 22:04:00 +0000

Today I implemented a couple of improvements into Regex Hero.

First we have a suggestion to allow the list of matched groups to be separated by tabs. This allows you to copy and paste the groups directly into a spreadsheet application like Excel.
Then we have a suggestion to create cleaner code generation when IgnorePatternWhitespace is checked. This essentially means that the regex string is divided into separate lines so that the comments are still at the end of each line, making the regular expression easier to follow.

Improved Textbox Scrolling and Overlapping Error Message Fixed

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wortham) — Mon, 16 Dec 2013 22:21:00 +0000

Today I improved the way the textboxes scroll inside Regex Hero. Now they'll follow the cursor more like you expect when you're moving the cursor around with the arrow keys or Page Up & Down buttons. This was a request on GetSatisfaction that obviously needed some attention.

And the other part of today's update is with the error message that'll appear below the regular expression box. It would overlap the regular expression textbox slightly and make it hard to navigate to the last line of text. So I've moved things around and that no longer happens.

Silverlight to be Supported Through 10/12/2021

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wortham) — Sat, 16 Nov 2013 18:57:00 +0000

Microsoft has not announced that they're working on Silverlight 6. And some people have asked me what I'm going to do about Regex Hero when Microsoft drops support for Silverlight. Well, there are certainly options and the options are always changing and evolving as new technologies are introduced.

However, we do know that Microsoft has announced that they will support Silverlight 5 until October 12th, 2021. In the meantime we'll likely see more and more attractive alternatives. And there's still the possibility that Microsoft will build a Silverlight 6 and extend the support for it even further. All said, the decision about Regex Hero's future codebase doesn't really have to be made today and we don't have to panic since we have at least another 8 years of Silverlight.

Upgraded to Silverlight 5 with 64-bit Browser Support

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wortham) — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 22:15:00 +0000

I upgraded Regex Hero to Silverlight 5 today. The change is relatively minor overall. One of the biggest reasons for the upgrade is the increased usage of 64-bit browsers. And Silverlight 5 is the first version to support 64-bit browsers.

Regex Hero Code Completion and Scrolling Bugs

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wortham) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 18:13:00 +0000

I fixed a couple bugs today. One was reported this morning about the scrolling when you hit the previous / next match buttons. The other was one I noticed where the replace textbox would trigger autocompletions in the regex box above it if you have an open backslash, parenthesis, or bracket. This was pretty annoying and I've changed it so the regex autocompletions will only work when the regex textbox has focus.

Regex Analysis Bug Fixes

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wortham) — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 16:26:00 +0000

All of these updates relate to the analyzer, so if you're not a Regex Hero Professional user, then this won't affect you.

I received a report of an analysis bug related to character classes. The regex analyzer wouldn't handle opening brackets inside a character class properly.

It's one of the finer details of the regular expression syntax. You wouldn't think that [[abc] would be valid, but it is. You don't have to escape the opening bracket inside the character class. So now the analyzer interprets this as it should.

I've also fixed bugs around interpreting the \x00 (hex), \u0000 (unicode), and \k<group> (backreference) expressions.

P.S. The major updates I mentioned recently are still in the works. So the price for Regex Hero Professional is still $20 for now.

Regex Hero Professional: Improvements and Pricing

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wortham) — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 23:33:00 +0000

I'm working on some new features for Regex Hero, focusing primarily on bringing more advanced functionality to Regex Hero Professional.

New Regex Hero Professional features in the works...

The analyzer will give you the option of automatically formatting your regular expression with comments.
The tool will analyze your regular expression and offer suggestions to improve the performance. For instance, there's a performance penalty in using IgnoreCase. And it's pointless to use it when there's nothing case-sensitive in your regular expression. There are many other things it'll look for, and this is something that will evolve and improve with time.

There will be various other things I'll be working on, but these are the big 2 features. When all of this is released, I'll also be raising the price for the Professional edition to $30.

I never make customers pay for updates. So if you're interested in the Professional edition, I'd suggest buying it now for $20 while you still can. Look out for the new improvements within the next couple months.

"Redo" on a Mac, and a Group Name Warning

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wortham) — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 18:42:00 +0000

Today I released a minor update, fixing a couple bugs:

"Redo" functionality now works as it should on a Mac via the Command-Shift-Z keyboard shortcut.
I've added a group name warning. There's a weird issue with the way the .NET Regex engine allows numeric entries in group names. For instance (?<2>abc)|(?<4>def) will not throw an error upon instantiation. However, when you enumerate through the groups that's when you get a runtime error. So I've added a rule to show a warning in this case that says, "Group names must begin with a word character, or if they're numeric they cannot have gaps between numbers."

C# Strings and Code Generation Bug Fixed

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wortham) — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 23:22:00 +0000

It was brought to my attention yesterday that there was a bug with the C# code generation feature inside Regex Hero. Thanks Blake for pointing it out. It turns out that I had made a stupid mistake in the way I was adding \r and \n to the string. I mostly rely on the @"string" literals because they're convenient and generally cleaner for what I need to do. But of course, the escaped notations \r and \n don't work inside those strings.

So this has been updated this morning. From now on Regex Hero will generate C# strings more like this...

@"line1" + "\n" + @"line2"

Optimized Memory Consumption

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wortham) — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 23:23:00 +0000

Today's update includes a minor change to the custom undo/redo system in all of the textboxes within Regex Hero. They will now only store history on the OnKeyUp event, rather than storing history for every change. In other words, if you hold down a key on the keyboard for a long time it's not going to store history for every single character individually anymore.

This is a subtle difference, but in real world usage this should have a substantial impact on how much memory is used to hold the text history.

ASP.NET MVC DataAnnotations and the RegularExpressionAttribute

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wortham) — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 15:27:00 +0000

A fellow Regex Hero user emailed me this morning about an inconsistency between what they were seeing in Regex Hero vs what they were seeing with the RegularExpression DataAnnotation in ASP.NET MVC.

As a test, they were trying the following regular expression...

^A|B|C$

Against this string...

ABC

In Regex Hero you see 3 matches (as you should). But in ASP.NET MVC it doesn't match, and validation fails.

Why is this?

As it turns out, the RegularExpressionAttribute is hiding an implementation detail. In fact, I couldn't even find any mention of this on MSDN.

It's most plainly visible if you open up the Javascript file that comes with an MVC project template, MicrosoftMvcValidation.js. Inside you'll find this bit of code...

var $0=new RegExp(this.$0);

var $1=$0.exec(value);

return (!Sys.Mvc._ValidationUtil.$0($1) && $1[0].length===value.length);

I've highlighted the important piece. It's checking to make sure the text value's length is equal to the match's length. In other words, the validation is designed to prevent any extraneous input beyond what a single regular expression match contains. And it does the same thing server side as well.

So for RegularExpressionAttribute testing purposes in Regex Hero you could just always use ^ and $ anchors for every regular expression. And then check to make sure that you're getting 1 match, and 1 match only.

Improved TextBoxes With Better Whitespace Support

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wortham) — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 22:23:00 +0000

Today's update is all about whitespace. I've created a new textbox control for Regex Hero which is now being used for the 4 main textboxes: Regular Expression, Replacement String, Target String, and Final String.

The new features are as follows:

Figure 1: Matching Line Feeds

Handles tab characters as it should. You can test this by entering \t in your regular expression and then hitting tab in your target string.
Matching carriage returns or line feeds are now visible with a half-width character block (as seen in the figure 1).
You may preserve the formatting of pasted text with the new "Preserve pasted formatting" option. This will retain the existing line endings of your source text as was suggested about a month ago.
Cycling through your matches with the up & down buttons is now much more responsive.

Now Supporting Facebook and Twitter Logins

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wortham) — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 20:46:00 +0000

This is something I've wanted to have for a long time but I simply haven't set aside the time to do it.

Well, no more waiting, Regex Hero now supports logging in with Facebook and Twitter...

If you already have an account with Regex Hero and want to sign in with something else (such as Facebook or Twitter) then you can add it to your account. Or if you're a brand new user of Regex Hero, create your account here.

New Benchmarking Features and a New Homepage Design

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wortham) — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 23:21:00 +0000

Today I updated the benchmarking tool in Regex Hero with some new functionality.

There were essentially two things I was looking to accomplish:

Create insight into the benchmarking tool so that developers know exactly what it's doing.
Add the ability to benchmark your regular expression with the IsMatch() function. IsMatch() simply returns true if your regular expression has even 1 match in the specified string. As such, it actually stops searching after the first match is found. In some cases this makes it many times faster than iterating through every match.

So now you'll see some new options to take care of all this...

You can click the Show/Hide benchmarking code button at any point if you want to know exactly what Regex Hero is going to do under every benchmarking loop. There are effectively 4 different benchmarking modes: 2 modes when the Match tab is selected, 1 mode for Replace, and 1 mode for Split.

Homepage Redesign

And of course I've redesigned the homepage. It's not too drastic of a departure from the old design. One problem I wanted to solve was that the Regex Hero character used to point to the big "Regex Hero" title at the top of the page as you see here...

The problem with this was that the Regex Hero title at the top is actually a link back to the homepage. So if you click it, all you'll see is the page reload. And I found through Google Analytics there were a good number of people clicking this link from the homepage, suggesting that maybe the chubby pointing finger was influencing where people clicked.

So the new design takes this idea and uses it to point to where you should actually click...