Testing regular expressions

Today I’ve got two good tools for web developers.

Lately I’ve had to write a number of regular expressions for the upcoming mnartists.org calendar – most in Java, and a few in Javascript. In theory a regexp is a regexp no matter the language, but in practice that’s rarely the case. Between these subtle differences and the maddening wait for compiling or reloading a page, it’s clear some sort of live testing environment is useful:

• Javascript tester – allows replacement testing as well
• Java tester – really nice in that it gives accurate feedback on your regexp errors and even helps you format the matching text as a java String

If you’re a developer messing with Java or Javascript regular expressions, IMHO it’s worth bookmarking those two pages.

Here’s a Java one – looks complicated, actually pretty straightforward. Anyone care to take a stab at what it does? 🙂

line = line.replaceAll(“[([bi])]([^[]*)[/1]”,”<$1>$2</$1>”);

(or can you do it better? I get by, but I know my regexps are sometimes clunky at best…)