Rozenberg's Version of Visual Regexp

I found this program very useful during the development of PAGE. It is written in Tcl/Tk and is a tool for developing regular expressions. Because of a lack of documentation I used it only in the most simple way. But even then it was quite helpful. My original remarks about Visual REGEXP were probably too harsh and I apologize to the author. Fortunately, the current version has a read me which helps a user get started.

I also disagreed with some ways it functioned. Perhaps I misunderstood its operation, due to a lack of documentation.

1. I noticed that when I hit one of the match string of buttons both the regular expression and the sample were erased. Further, the sample window was overwritten by the match string. I was always reentering the items, testing a small change and they were gone. I changed the program to (1) write the match string in another window and (2) leave the regular expression and the sample window unchanged.
2. I found that when I wanted to reload the regular expression or the sample I had to go thru the whole file dialog business anew. I changed the program to remember the file names that had been loaded and to fill in the dialog boxes with them.
3. After fussing around getting the regular expression the way I wanted it, there was no convenient way to save the regular expression into a file. Just being able to put it on the clipboard did not seem enough. I made the change to add saving the regular expression to the File menu.
4. When one copies the regular expression to the clipboard, the program copies a complete tcl command for executing that regexp and I just want to have the expression. My version is so changed.

My notes:

When you start Visual Regexp you are presented with a window with two text areas. The upper one is for the regular expression that you want to test and the lower is the sample of string data that you want to subject to the regexp in the top window.

You can use entries in the file menu to load either or both of the text areas or you can edit them directly from the keyboard (just put the cursor in the text area and just type). When you hit the 'Go' button the regexp is parsed showing in a color code the different components of the regular expression and the portions of the sample which match those portions in the same coding. There is another string of buttons for showing the individual pieces of the sample corresponding to the individual match expressions. Those matches are in the same color coding as in the regular expression and are displayed in a separate window.

You can download visual_regexp-1.2R.tgz.

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