[Thousand-Oaks-pm] The Regexp Tester application

[David Oswald]

On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 6:32 AM, Tommy Stanton <tommystanton at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wow, this is quality stuff, thanks!  Looking forward to seeing the source.

I'm glad you like it.  Feel free to put it to use.  There's a "Link to
this test" link at the bottom that will provide a GET request to the
current regex test, so if you want you can paste a link into a forum
to demonstrate how a given pattern match works.  I intend to leave the
app running.

> Thanks for your contributions to ThousandOaks.pm. :)  I may have met
> you once, at the August meeting last year. [0]  I've seen moved to
> Tennessee, but I've been happy to see your presentations bubble up in
> the last year at both TO.pm and at LA.pm.

Well, I've enjoyed attending.  I do remember meeting you just before
your move.  It's been fun attending, learning, and participating.

> I was at the recent YAPC and this video [1] by Damian Conway was
> shown, regarding his upcoming CPAN module, Regexp::Debugger.  Have you
> seen this?  It's definitely related to your Mojolicious-powered
> project.

I have seen that video.  I was actually disappointed that the module
wasn't available yet for inclusion in this pet project.  I'm not quite
sure how I would go about integrating it though; seems like it's
designed to be used interactively in a way that is probably difficult
to reproduce in a web application unless I get into some heavy
Javascripting to expose the module to the end user interactively.
...and I'm not good enough with Javascript to do that. ;)  But once
the module is released maybe the POD will show how to use it
programatically instead of interactively, and if that happens I'll be
eager to toss it into the mix.

I wanted to also include YAPE::Regex::Explain output, but
unfortunately it produces NO output (well, it does say "The regular
expression:", and then stops there).  I think it's got something to do
with the fact that the application's RE's are running under
"unicode_strings" semantics, which wasn't even an available feature
when YAPE::Regex::Explain was last maintained.  The module also
doesn't support any RE feature newer than 5.6.x, so it would have
produced errant output if someone uses a newer feature.  So in the
end, it didn't make the cut.

There's also a module named GraphViz2::Regexp (or something like that)
which produces a graphical representation of a regular expression's
flow.  But Dotcloud doesn't have the C libraries installed to support
the GraphViz2 module.  I can easily configure my Dotcloud service to
pull in any Perl module, but when external C libraries are required I
sort of have to take what they offer.  I might be able to ask for the
library to be added, but since I'm just using a "free" sandbox
application, I don't want to push my luck by over-indulging in their
kindness.

-- 

David Oswald
daoswald at gmail.com