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Review: The Regulator

• By Mike Gunderloy
• November 21, 2003

The Regulator 1.02b2
Free
Roy Osherove
royo.is-a-geek.com/iserializable/regulator/

Regular expressions are a powerful and complex feature of the Microsoft .NET Framework (and of many other programming environments as well, of course). If you're working with regexes in .NET, and need a powerful environment for editing and testing them, you definitely ought to take a look at The Regulator. The price is right and the feature list is longer than I've seen in other regex utilities.

To begin with, of course, you can enter a regular expression, input and replacement strings, and experiment with match, split, and replace behavior. Actually, you can enter more than one regular expression, because the color-coded editor supports multiple open documents, as well as collapsing and expanding sections. You can save the regular expressions to disk and or use a disk file as the input to work with.

Not sure what to enter to get the regex you want? Right-click and follow the shortcut menus to add in any of the .NET regex syntax. Also useful is "Escape Selection", which adds appropriate whitespace markers to turn a literal string into something that will work inside of a regex.

Want a starting point? You can search the library of regular expressions at RegexLib.com and import your results directly from The Regulator's interface. If you've come up with a genius-level regex of your own, a wizard guides you through the process of adding it to the RegexLib.com library.

An "expert snippets" window stores chunks of text to save you typing, while a performance graph lets you see the effects of modifying your expression as you tune it. The whole can also be minimized to the system tray - useful if you're working on an application where you need regex support at all times.

What's missing? There's no help file or code generation -- yet. But Roy is actively working on the application, and I hear more good things are coming down the pike. In short order, The Regulator has become the most comprehensive of the .NET regex applications out there. And it's still free.