Show HN: RegEx for Regular Folk – A visual, example-based introduction
I think what regex's need is a really powerful syntax and language aware regex editor.I've been using regexs for most of my career, and still struggle to get them right on first writing.The #1 problem I run into is:what is a literal character and what is a control character?for example, both these are very common:- match a parenthesis character or a period character- use a parenthesis to group a match or use a period to match any one characterYou would think I would learn it once, and be good.but my #2 problem confounds this:what is a literal character and what is a control character - in the language I am using?for example I might need to escape a period to make it a literal for a regex.If I am checking the files filexc and file.c and want to match the second, the regex I want is  ^.*\.c$

in perl, I could say:  $rx = "^.*\\.c\$";    ($" is a thing)
  if ($f =~ /$regex/) { ...

better would be:  if ($f =~ /^.*\.c$/) {...

in python I would write  m = re.search("^.*\\.c$",f)

better would be:  m = re.search(r'^.*\.c$', f)

in a shell script, I might say:  grep "^.*\\.c$"

EDIT: crap, I had to escape my comment because the asterisk in the regex was making my text italic