RegexCraft vs The Regex Coach
RegexCraft
regexcraft.comThe Regex Coach
weitz.deSide by side
| Figure | RegexCraft | The Regex Coach |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 1 |
| Spec score · Regular Expression Testers | 8.3 (#5) | 7.3 (#13) |
| Maker | RegexCraft is created and maintained by Marshall Moorman, and its application source is proprietary. | The site identifies Prof. Dr. Edmund Weitz as the maker and lists his address at HAW Hamburg in Hamburg, Germany. |
Plans
In their own words
RegexCraft
RegexCraft is a desktop workbench for testing, replacing, comparing, debugging, and generating regular expressions. It supports .NET, PCRE2, and JavaScript with full fidelity; other listed flavors have High or Approximate fidelity. Match mode highlights matches and capture groups, while Replace mode previews substitutions and supports backreferences. Compare mode puts results from two to four flavors side by side, showing validity, matches, groups, fidelity, and known differences. Its educational step-through walkthrough covers the .NET engine using F10 and F11. A GREP tool searches and replaces across folders with include and exclude globs, cancellation, dry-run, and backups. It can generate code snippets for languages including C#, JavaScript, Python, Go, and Swift. Library, history, and settings stay in the operating system's application-data folder; the core product has no account system or cloud sync. Personal use is free. Commercial, organizational, government, or revenue-generating use requires a $49.00 USD one-time Business license.
The Regex Coach
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 Linux is no longer maintained, though an unsupported 0.8.5 release is available and also runs on FreeBSD.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.