Specialized Tools and Utilities for Working with Regular Expressions

These tools and utilities have regular expressions as the core of their functionality.

grep - The utility from the UNIX world that first made regular expressions popular

PowerGREP - Next generation grep for Microsoft Windows

RegexBuddy - Learn, create, understand, test, use and save regular expressions. RegexBuddy makes working with regular expressions easier than ever before.

General Applications with Notable Support for Regular Expressions

There are a lot of applications these days that support regular expressions in one way or another, enhancing certain part of their functionality. But certain applications stand out from the crowd.

EditPad Pro - Convenient text editor with a powerful regex-based search and replace feature, as well as regex-based customizable syntax coloring.

Programming Languages and Libraries

If you are a programmer, you can save a lot of coding time by using regular expressions. With a regular expression, you can do powerful string parsing in only a handful lines of code, or maybe even just a single line. A regex is faster to write and easier to debug and maintain than dozens or hundreds of lines of code to achieve the same by hand.

Delphi - Delphi does not have built-in regex support. Delphi for .NET can use the .NET framework regex support. For Win32, there are several PCRE-based VCL components available.

Java - There are many 3rd-party regex libraries available for Java. As of JDK 1.4, Sun also provides its own regular expression classes. The JDK 1.4 java.util.regex package is discussed here.

JavaScript - If you use JavaScript to validate user input on a web page at the client side, using JavaScript's built-in regular expression support will greatly reduce the amount of code you need to write.

.NET (dot net) - Microsoft's new development framework includes a poorly documented, but very powerful regular expression package, that you can use in any .NET-based programming language such as C# (C sharp) or VB.NET.

Perl - The text-processing language that gave regular expressions a second life, and introduced many new features. Regular expressions are an essential part of Perl.

PCRE - Popular open source regular expression library written in ANSI C that you can link directly into your C and C++ applications, or use through an .so (UNIX/Linux) or a .dll (Windows).

PHP - Popular language for creating dynamic web pages, with two sets of regex functions.

Python - Popular high-level scripting language with a comprehensive built-in regular expression library

Ruby - Another popular high-level scripting language with comprehensive regular expression support as a language feature.