Regex Debugger

This essay is about a suggested student project in Java programming. This essay gives a rough overview of how it might work. It does not describe an actual complete program. I have no source, object, specifications, file layouts or anything else useful to implementing this project. Everything I have to say to help you with this project is written below. I am not prepared to help you implement it; I have too many other projects of my own.

I do contract work for a living, which could include writing a program such as this. However, I don’t do people’s homework for them. That just robs them of an education.

You have my full permission to implement this project any way you please.

Composing Regular Expressions is daunting for anyone but a dedicated geek. The intent of this program is to make writing and debugging complex regexes easier.

It is an interactive program. You fill in your regex pattern and a set of test strings. In the simplest version, it simply puts check marks beside the strings that match.

In a more complex version, it trims the length of the regex pattern back and back until it finds a match on, independently for each string. It displays the matching part of the regex and the matching part of the String next to the full string so you can see where it is getting in trouble. You can be pretty mindless in how you trim the regex, allowing Pattern. compile to discover any generated invalid patterns and notify you with exceptions. Of course some of the pattersns are not supposed to match at all, but that is fine too.

regex
Regex Composer
Regex Proofreader
Regex Utility

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