Today I took my first step into the world of regular expressions. This cryptic, but fascinating, system provides fast text searching and validation, and it’s a new native feature of Actionscript 3. To aid myself in the learning process, I put together a simple little application to provide instant visual feedback on the results of regular expression matching with some input text. If no results are found, the input box turns red, otherwise it appears green. Multiple strings will appear in the results box when the expression returns more than one match.
An email validation expression is the default input. If you use this code in another project, you can initialize the RegExForm component to start out with blank input if you wish. In the demo, additional forms may be added dynamically. I find it useful to see and compare different variations of an expression simultaneously.
The source code is available for download. It is released under the MIT license. You may also view the demo. Flash Player 9 Beta 3 is required.
Kewl bro. Its crazy gibberish but aparently very powerful. will have a look.
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Very good tool. By the way, it will be handy to see some Flex 2 regex guidelines while playing with it. Also, I think stretched input field would be more useful to fit long RegExes, isn’t it?
Thanks for adding the link to the Flex 2 regex guidelines, Rostislav. I agree that the input field should be longer for long regexes. Perhaps I will update the component to include resizing.
[...] I recently posted a very simple component there. It’s a specialized TextInput box that will grow or shrink to fit its text. This component is beyond simple to implement, but it worked well in my Regular Expression explorer and I’m sure that others can find uses for it too. [...]
[...] I enhanced my Regular Expressions Explorer. Type in a regular expression, and some text to validate or search on, and it will show a list of [...]
What would the regexp look like if one required at least one number and one special character with a range from 6-12 characters? i.e., for a password input field. Thanks!
Sorry worked, I’m no regex expert. That’s why I made this app, so it would be easy to play around with regex until I figured it out.
…and I appreciate the app, I’ll be using it as I too learn more about regexp. Also, I found this snippet and it requires 6-12 characters, one uppercase, one lowercase and one number: ^(?=.*\d)(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z]).{5,13}$ Now to find a way to require one special character and I’m all set.
^(?=.*\d)(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z])(?=.*[&\-#!%]).{5,13}$ Working! Thanks again for the app!
Hey Josh,
I’ve followed your work for some time and enjoyed your presentation on creating your TreeMap component at FlexManiacs in D.C. You do some great work.
I just stumbled on this post about creating a regular expression tool and wanted to let you know about a similar application I’ve recently created that takes the idea a bit further.
It’s called the Flex 3 Regular Expression Explorer (similar in many ways to the Component and Styles Explorers) and includes not only the ability to work with regular expressions in a live-updating tool and an example library of common expressions, but also the ability to share your own examples with the community and an integrated help/reference panel.
http://blog.ryanswanson.com/2008/10/introducing-flex-3-regular-expression.html
I hope you’ll check it out and would certainly love some feedback.
Thanks,
Ryan
Ryan, I spotted your RegExp Explorer a few days ago. It’s very cool. I don’t work with regular expressions often, but I’ll definitely look to play around with your explorer in the future.