rteague/regextester

A CLI tool for testing regular expressions (regex) using various regex flavors (bre, ere, pcre, etc.).

RegexTester Template

A CLI tool for testing regular expressions (regex) using various regex languages.

Table of Contents

• Installation/Setup
  • Requirements
• Usage and Examples

Installation/Setup

Requirements

regext was tested on python version 2.7.10 and it should work with any Unix/Linux system. The embedded perl code was tested on perl version 5.18.2.

Install

To install system wide run:

cd /path/to/regextester && sudo bash setup.sh install

Uninstall

To uninstall the regext program run:

cd /path/to/regextester && sudo bash setup.sh uninstall

Usage and Examples

Program help:

regext --help

regext reads from stdin for the test string, so you could | pipe from echo or cat.

Example 1:

echo "abcd" | regext -e '/(a(b)c)d/'

Example 1 output:

Match Successful!
Match number 1, with 2 group(s):
Full Match = abcd
Group[1] = abc
Group[2] = b

The default -l/--lang option is pcre, you could specify python's regex like so:

echo "abcd" | regext -l py -e '(a(b)c)d'

List of all available regex languages you can run tests with:

• pcre (default) (synonym: php)
• perl (synonym: pl)
• python (synonym: py)

To use python's regex flags use the -f/--flags option after the --lang specification.

For a single flag:

-f I

For multiple flags:

--flags="I|S"

If you expect a lot of output from matches, pipe to less with the -R option:

echo "abcd" | regext -l py -f I -e '(a(b)c)d' | less -R