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.