SPUG: Regex animations

[Michael R. Wolf]

Apropos my previous posting regarding regex animations, does anyone  
have a favorite tool to help debug regex's?

Here's the 3 in my Delicious, tagged by regex
1.  http://osteele.com/tools/reanimator/
2.  http://regex.powertoy.org/
3.  http://www.myregextester.com/index.php#sourcetab

Specifically, has anyone used the ActiveState IDE that's got pieces of  
MJD's code?

Is there such a tool in Eclipse?

(Full disclosure:  Emacs is my IDE.  I shall not want.  It maketh  
me....  It maketh my code.
I shall not covet thy neighbors IDE.  But I'm curious...)

One of the reasons I'm interested is that I got a paper accepted at  
OSCON a few years ago.  It was a work in progress called REplay, an  
environment to play with (i.e. learn) RE's.  As I was putting the  
paper together, I realized that much of it was not new.  It was just  
new to me.  That's where I found that MJD's work had gotten subsumed  
(and contracted) by ActiveState in their "RE debugger".  I knew better  
than to try to "break new trail" behind MJD, so I stopped work,  
withdrew the paper, and went on to other tasks.

It's been years since then.  I'm sure there are other animations,  
debuggers, and the like, in various states of polish or disrepair.   
Which ones do you use when you're trying to wrap a new regex around  
some test data?



P.S.  For those keeping track, the first sentence in this posting is a  
question, no?
P.P.S.  For those keeping track, the previous sentence in this posting  
is a question, yes?
P.P.P.S.  :-)
-- 
Michael R. Wolf
     All mammals learn by playing!
         MichaelRWolf at att.net