Glad to hear it! Sounds like RegexMagic is quite helpful.

Hi Greg and all,



Just to let you know that today I finally had the opportunity to test a Regex match and replace and with the help of the RegexMagic I was able to create the correct pattern and replaced the previous flat condition which had to match several characters using String.Replace().Replace(), etc.



Once again, thanks for the contribution and push nicely for us to move in the right direction

Edhy Rijo

I think I'd try RegexMagic. It looks really accessible, with the ability to build regex patterns without having to actually know regex (i.e. they've abstracted out many pattern matching concepts to a higher level...you can search for a SSN rather than having to know the regex ([0-9]{3}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{4}). It also can generate code snippets for you. And there is a free trial... Sounds like its worth a try to me!



http://www.regexmagic.com/

http://www.regexmagic.com/download.html



Regex Buddy is more useful if you already know regex (or want to learn it) and it doesn't have a free trial (but does have a nice money back guarantee).



My guess is that you'd still want to learn regex, but regex magic might make it possible to start using regex without the hours of trying to figure out how to build a pattern, which might actually increase the speed you learn it.

Whatever tool you use notice there is a regex tutorial link on the ultrapico page.

Thanks Charles,



Believe me, taking a quick look at the Regex Magic and Buddy, they looks very powerful and I like the fact of how they highlight all parts to be matched.



Expresso looks good but I am under the impression that you need to be a more Regex experience developer to take the best of that tool.



The Just-Great-Software tools feels like a more intuitive tool, even though there is no a trial or demo version, the money back policy looks good and also the price is very affordable for such a tool, now the question is which one to choose Regexbuddy or RegexMagic?

Edhy Rijo

Hey, good to know. I've got RegexBuddy, will have a look at RegexMagic too.

Using some kind of tool definitely makes using Regex easier. The tool I use is Regex Buddy:



http://www.regexbuddy.com/



The same company also has a new tool Regex Magic that looks promising:



http://www.regexmagic.com/



It's nice to have choices.

Hey Edhy



As you explore regex be sure to check out this free tool - Expresso



http://www.ultrapico.com/Expresso.htm

I agree, I have been wanted to get into RegEx since I was working with VFP and I have read some documentation about them but like you said it make take some deep testing to get the matching expressions correct.



This particular fix looks pretty simple, but when calling this method/function hundreds of time in a process it could take more time than using a properly RegEx expression, so I will explore it too this week.

Edhy Rijo

I'm glad you got it going.



I'd suggest that when you have some time, you might learn some more about regex. I just barely touched on the power of them. They can get very hairy to work with, but they have tons of power. They are also fast. And this is pretty much exactly what they were designed to do. The SF SyntaxEditor uses regex to do the color highlighting. While the initial learning can be a bear, once you have an understanding of them, they turn many hard problems into rather simple ones.