Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Introducing RXTK

I made a thing. A large part of my work­ing after­noon today was spent work­ing with cry­ing over reg­u­lar expres­sions, a fate vari­ously described as “worse than death.” Many moons ago I had access to a license for Komodo IDE, a fine PHP IDE that hap­pens to include a util­ity called RX Toolbox.

RX Toolbox provides an inter­act­ive editor for reg­u­lar expres­sions that high­lights matches in sample text as you type; Komodo also costs many, many pesos. These two facts, while seem­ingly not related, com­bine to mean that I don’t have access to RX Toolbox, and des­per­ately need it. So this even­ing I decided I’d build my own util­ity to fill this gap: Rxtk.

Rxtk provides an easy-to-use inter­act­ive inter­face that allows you to enter sample text, a PCRE expres­sion, spe­cify a delim­iter char­ac­ter and options, and see the expression’s matches high­lighted imme­di­ately. Eventually it’ll sup­port mul­ti­part matches (groups) and the like, but right now it ful­fils the need I had, so I thought I’d get it released. Let me know what you think, eh?