Re-builder on X-Emacs
Ξ January 24th, 2010 | → 0 Comments |
∇ Tools | ∇ Regex, X-Emacs |
Regular expressions are an important development tool for me. Every day there are patterns to be found on text output (e.g a especific tag on an xml file, or a given value in a csv file) or configuration files.
Until recently, the best tool to find such patterns was egrep, which prints the lines of a text file that match a given pattern. grep can be used to match ’simple text’, but used with option -E (egrep is an alias for grep -E) it searched for regular expressions.
egrep is a very useful tool, but very recently I found out that there is an X-Emacs builtin “regex” builder.
Just activate-it by M-x re-builder. The “regex” builder allows to create the regular expression, while finding the matches in the active buffer. I don’t know any other tool that does that in linux. I love it.
NOTE: This feature did not always work in X-Emacs (it wasn’t fully compatible since it was primarily developed for Emacs). I’m using the current Ubuntu 9.10 packages.
