Regex Hero vs The Regex Coach

Regex Hero is a.NET regular expression tester for writing patterns and checking their behavior in.NET applications. The web tester runs in real time and highlights matches as users type. Its editor includes regex syntax highlighting and code completion, and the site provides a.NET regular expression reference. Users can generate C# and VB.NET code from patterns. A community library lists 179 regular expressions in categories such as email, validation, CSV, and password. Regex Hero is available on the web and Windows, and its tester page links to a Microsoft Store download. The home page says a Mac version is not yet available. The product is free: the Regex Hero Professional plan costs nothing, with no exact current plan limits stated. The news page announced that Professional became free in July 2017. BucketSoft, LLC is the maker; its about page says Steve Wortham founded the company in March 2009. Wortham provides support by email and through a forum for ideas and bug reports. The privacy policy says collected information may include names, email addresses, and browser information for analytics. It also says submitted ratings, reviews, and feedback may be displayed, reused, and distributed.

The Regex Coach is a graphical application for experimenting interactively with Perl-compatible regular expressions. It shows whether a pattern matches a target string and updates the interface when changes are made. Users can highlight captured groups or selected parts of a pattern in the target text. The application can attempt a plain-English explanation of a regex, show its parse tree graphically, and step through the matching process. It also simulates Perl split and substitution operations. Written in Common Lisp, it uses CL-PPCRE as its regex engine. The current Windows download is version 0.9.2; the maker says the program has not changed since 2008. Linux is no longer maintained, though an unsupported 0.8.5 release is available and also runs on FreeBSD. There is no Mac version planned. The program is provided as-is without warranty, and the maker says not to expect support for older Windows configurations or the unsupported Linux release. The engine may overflow its stack with relatively long regular expressions. The listed plan is free, with conditions for commercial use and redistribution.