A regex tester is one of those tools developers often need. I used many different ones over the years and have never settled on one that I really like. I have seen some paid ones that looked promising but I hoped to find a good free one. A few months ago I came across Regex Hero which is an online Silverlight based regex tester for .NET. It has both a free and a paid version ($15) . I have not used the paid version so my description is based solely on the free version.
Regex Hero has all the standard features you expect with a regex tester.
1. Syntax highlighting
2. Syntax checking
3. Real time matching, replacing and splitting against a target string
4. Group matching
In addition to these pretty standard features Regex Hero has a couple really nice additional features.
1. Context sensitive completion menus
2. Generate C#/VB code from your regular expression
3. Save your regexes online and access from any computer
This tool is definitely a steal for a price of $0. If anyone has tried the “pro” features of Regex Hero I would love to hear what you think about it but for now I am more than satisfied with the free version of this great tool.
Hi
I am looking at this tool and trying to see how it compares with Espresso as I am continuely using RegEx in Nintex workflows. A couple of things do put me off: Only FIrefox and IE9+ are supported whereas I am a heavy chrome user. Silverlight is a bit dated and there should be an HTML5 version. Did you try the pro version in the end
I wrote this 5-years ago and I am not sure what the current best tool is. I am sure there are some new great ones out there :)
Since it’s Silverlight, it’s really mostly effective for testing regular expressions used in .NET.