With a desperate need to debug a lengthy regular expression destined for use with the excellent [RegexKitLite](http://regexkit.sourceforge.net/RegexKitLite/) library, I have quickly put together a Mac OS X application.
Reginald is a kindly old gentleman devoted to assisting you with those tricky regular expressions.
Provide some sample input, and your regular expression, and Reginald will provide you with colour-coded output and a list of all your matches and the corresponding capture groups for your exploration. Select a match or capture group in the list to the right, and the corresponding text will be selected in the panel to the left.
Reginald is built on [RegexKitLite](http://regexkit.sourceforge.net/RegexKitLite/), and so uses the [ICU syntax](http://regexkit.sourceforge.net/RegexKitLite/index.html#ICUSyntax).
It will run on Mac OS X 10.6 and above.
[Download Reginald here](http://github.com/michaeltyson/Reginald/downloads), or [access the source on GitHub](http://github.com/michaeltyson/Reginald).
Hi Michael,
just wanted to say a big thanks for this. I’ve been looking for a regex debugger off and on for the Mac for several years. I came across Reginald today, it works a treat and it will be taking up a permanent place in my application folder.
Kind regards,
Neil
Hi Michael,
This tool is invaluable – I use it for debugging my regexes all the time, and it’s even proven helpful as a learning aid (I’ve been using it to learn about read ahead and read behind).
Great stuff.
Is there any source code available? I would love to port this over to Windows…
Idiot – I just saw the source code. I’ll take a look.
Cheers, Joe, I’m glad it’s helped you!
Source: RTFM ;-) (see above)
Michael,
RTFM indeed! First time I’ve seen that acronym used by someone else, great.
This is a great little tool, and is better than many of the regex evaluators out there. I’m an ObjC n00b. Is there anywhere to easily apply the full regex kit framework? I would love to see a more robust PCRE version of this!
Thanks.