Is anyone aware of any utility to help folks develop regular expressions that can be used in grep and BBEdit and such? I don't use Grep a lot but when I do, I have to experiment to get the right RegEx to find what I'm looking for. I use BBEdit a lot for looking through my server logs.
What I envision is a utility that allows me to paste in some sample text, for example, one line from a log file. I'd then select portions of that text and click a button that says: "This text never changes" and I'd repeat that until I had identified all the non-variable portions of the example text. The remainder would be assumed to be varying or changing from one instance of the text to another. Rather than paste in sample text, perhaps I'd select a file and the utility would show me a line of that file in which I'd identify the fixed parts. With the text portions identified as either fixed (unchanging) or variable, I'd then select the text portion I want to find and click the appropriate button to identify it as such. Having categorized the input, I'd then tell it what output I wanted, whether than be a Regex for find/replace, a summary or counting of found lines, counting of the number of instances of different IP addresses, etc. After I'd told it what I want to do with the found data, it would spit out the regular expressions I needed to accomplish it. For example, I could use the Find and Replace expressions in BBEdit. Or it could just independently process the input file(s) and provide the desired output. Anyone know of a utility to assist folks like myself who don't think in regular expressions? -- ------------------------------------------------------------------ Have a feature request? Not sure the software's working correctly? If so, please send mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, not to the list. List FAQ: <http://www.barebones.com/support/lists/bbedit_talk.shtml> List archives: <http://www.listsearch.com/BBEditTalk.lasso> To unsubscribe, send mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
