I can’t even begin to tell you how much I’ve used the free RegExr online regular expression tester in the past, but a comment on that article by Oliver pointed out another regex tester that I enjoy because of its sheer simplicity. The thing I wasn’t always fond of with RegExr is that it’s Flash-based and didn’t work on mobile devices such as my iPad. Sure, it’s not often that I’d want to do this on my iPad, but it would be a great way to test an idea that pops in my head when I’m on-the-go.
The site, Rejex, is purely powered by JavaScript though which means it will work fine in most browsers. When you visit the homepage you’ll see that it has a field for the regular expression, the string you want to test against, some options (case insensitive matching, global matching, and multiline matching), and finally a box that displays any matches. Getting results is fast because there is no submit button… it’s all done on-the-fly as you’re typing. It also includes a quick reference guide below the input fields for many of the common predefined character classes.
Despite how great Rejex is there is definitely still a place in my bookmarks for RegExr, which is able to display more details about matches and groupings than Rejex does. So if you’re looking for a powerful online regex editor you’ll probably want to stick with RegExr, otherwise Rejex is about as fast and simple as it gets.
Ryan,
Thanks for linking to Rejex, I’m glad you are finding it useful. I am planning to add groupings at some point to rejex, but I will always make sure that the app is incredibly simple to use!
Thanks for the update Oliver! Groupings will definitely make this even better, and I look forward to seeing it in action.