[regex-coach] Feature requests/bug reports

[Edi Weitz]

On Sun, 5 Nov 2006 03:30:35 -0500, Charlie Hayes <cosmotic at cybercoment.com> wrote:

> My friend was using it on some HTML, basically parsing out the
> decimal values from a table. Sorry I cant give you the exact
> strings.  He's on XP pro and the latest version as of a week ago. It
> was pretty definite that it would freeze up, if he used it for more
> than one minute it would freeze up. He did some drag-selecting
> inside the regex box that seemed to cause repeated evaluations.

That sounds like the result of a complicated/inefficient regular
expression.  Without the exact strings it's hard to say.  It
frequently happens that people who don't have much experience with
regular expressions end up building regexes which force the machine
into seemingly endless backtracking.  (Note that this isn't a problem
of Regex Coach but a general problem of regular expressions.)

I'd be happy to investigate this further, but I need a reproducable
example first.  I'm pretty sure the application doesn't have a memory
leak.

> As for the radio buttons, if there are more than 10 groups to
> extract, your out of luck. Also, you cant view the contents of the
> group without clicking on the radio button and then looking in the
> subject box.
>
> It would be great if you made the group radio buttons into a list
> box that displayed the group index, start, end, length, and
> contents.

I've had similar requests already and my usual reply is that Regex
Coach is an application you use to /experiment/ with regular
expressions while you learn them.  It is not intended to be a bulk
regex tester for pro users.  If you use it like that and it works for
you, that's fine.  If it doesn't, you probably have to resort to other
apps.  I'm told there is "competition" that can do that but costs
money - haven't tried it, though.

> He was getting over 10 groups, maybe thats what may have been
> causing the freeze ups.

The number of groups doesn't really matter for the performance - it
matters how and if they are nested and if they contain repetitions.