Oleg Sych

Regular expressions are a powerful tool for working with text. Unfortunately, like most powerful tools, it is also complex and difficult to learn. In business application development, I find myself having to use regular expressions only once every couple of month, which gives me enough time to forget how to write them. That’s where the Regulator comes in.

Regulator is an advanced, free regular expressions testing and learning tool written by Roy Osherove. It allows you to build and verify a regular expression against any text input and displays matching, splitting or replacement results within an easy to understand, hierarchical tree. Regulator has a fully-featured regular expression editor with color highlighting and IntelliSense, code snippets, regular expression analyzer (which translates regular expressions in plain English) and online search powered by RegExLib.com.

You can download Regulator from Roy’s web site or Source Forge where he hosts his open source project. Current version comes without an installer; you simply extract the files to a folder on your hard drive. If you are developing under non-admin user account, you will need to make sure that Regulator has write access to *.config and *.xml files in its installation directory. Regulator will crash with an obscure error if it cannot open these files in exclusive mode. Here is how I made it work under regular user account on my XP workstation:

• Download Regulator20Bin.zip from Roy’s web site
• Extract files from the archive into C:\Program Files\Roy Osherove\The Regulator 2.0 directory
• Modify security settings of quickmenu.config and snippets.xml to grant local Users group Modify permission
• Modify advanced security settings of "The Regulator 2.0" directory to grant local Users group permissions to Create Files and Create Folders (this allows Regulator to create two additional .settings files)