5 Responses to “Regular Expressions for Dummies”

1. Jim Salmons (Sohodojo and SoyaWax Intl.) says:

   May 6, 2009 at 4:17 pm

   Hi Marcus,

   I wholeheartedly second your opinion (after you pointed me to this from your recent Twitter script article)! RegExBuddy is just so good that it makes using Regular Expressions for ‘one off’ personal work practical.

   In the past, if you were a software developer the extra effort to develop and test a non-trivial regular expression was worth it as your effort had a “multiplier effect” of being incorporated into your program. But too often when text editors and other searching/replacing and similar utilities have supported regexes, they have been little used (unless the user was a programmer with prior regex experience). RegExBuddy changes all that.

   Bottom line for me after having used RegExBuddy from its first version (now up to an even much better version 3), is that I now routinely use regexes in everyday work PLUS I am much more inclined to use them when programming. It is not an overstatement to say that RegExBuddy lets me routinely create, test, and then use regular expressions that I could NEVER devise and understand without RegExBuddy.

   Given the power of Macro Scheduler scripting, especially the ability to incorporate VBScript seamlessly, I wholeheartedly recommend Macro Scheduler users to give the free trial of RegExBuddy a try.

   Now, what would be REALLY cool would be for you and Jan Goyvaerts to work together to add the kind of seamless tool integration between RegExBuddy and Macro Scheduler Editor that is available for many of the ‘mainstream’ languages and tools!

   Thanks again for helping to spread the good word about yet another talented independent software author and publisher. You, Marcus, and Jan are a rare and valuable breed!

   –Jim–
2. jpuziano says:

   May 7, 2009 at 1:07 am

   Hi Jim,

   Thanks for posting that… I couldn’t agree more with all your points… well said!

   “Now, what would be REALLY cool would be for you and Jan Goyvaerts to work together to add the kind of seamless tool integration between RegExBuddy and Macro Scheduler Editor that is available for many of the ‘mainstream’ languages and tools!”

   That sounds good but could you post a few examples of what you mean by seamless tool integration?

   I’ll start…

   - You’re in the Macro Scheduler editor and the cursor is on a line starting with a RegEx> command. You click a button and it opens RegExBuddy which imports whatever you may have for a regex expression in your RegEx> command.

   - Note that your RegEx> command may hold a regex expressed in EasyPatterns from Datamystic.

   http://www.datamystic.com/easypatterns_reference.html

   - Would it be helpful if RegEx Buddy could import the EasyPattern regex… thereby helping you to understand and further refine it?

   - Clicking an export button in RegExBuddy might send the refined regex back to the macro Scheduler Editor… updating the line.

   What else did you have in mind Jim? Or anyone out there… let’s hear your ideas.

   The more things get talked about, the greater the chances of them being built.

   Take care
3. Marcus Tettmar says:

   May 7, 2009 at 7:04 am

   Hi guys,

   The idea of integrating RegExBuddy had already occurred to me and is on the cards. RegExBuddy already has a command line and COM interface which would allow this without any work on Jan’s part. See: http://www.regexbuddy.com/integration.html

   We could add a button to the code builder for the RegEx command to take you off to RegExBuddy and back again (assuming it is installed).
4. Jan Goyvaerts says:

   May 8, 2009 at 7:13 am

   If Macro Scheduler uses a regex flavor that is already supported by RegexBuddy, then Marcus can implement the same level of integration between Macro Scheduler and RegexBuddy as we have created with our own products PowerGREP and EditPad Pro. The COM interface used by PowerGREP and EditPad Pro is fully documented in RegexBuddy’s help file. And this of course applies to any other product and developer.

   We don’t have any plans for “Easy Patterns”. There isn’t anything particularly easy about [punctuation 1+ not letter or digit or '.' or symbol]
5. Marcus Tettmar says:

   May 8, 2009 at 8:05 am

   Hi Jan,

   Don’t necessarily agree with you on EasyPatterns. To someone that has never seen or even heard of RegEx before (that would probably include the majority of Macro Scheduler customers) EasyPatterns makes a lot more sense in some situations. [EmailAddress] is an awful lot more meaningful to the average computer user than “([a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+(?:\.[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+)*@(?:[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?\.)+[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?)” !!

   Anyway, as Macro Scheduler supports PCRE I will definitely look at integrating RegExBuddy in the next release.