Comments on: Quick Find Regular Expressions

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 03:21:00 +0000

Dick -

The font is perfectly legible now. The size has increased more than the ratio you mention, and it's dark in color.

By: Dan Kingsbury

Dan Kingsbury — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 20:34:00 +0000

Love this tool. I've always thought MS software would benefit from better-integrated RegEx support. I'm surprised you say you have used them a dozen times in your life; I probably use them a dozen times an hour.

Another suggestion for solving the incremental search vs. invalid-RegEx problem would be to require a RegEx to be formatted as in many text-oriented languages' (AWK, Perl, Ruby, ...) RegEx support, inside forward-slash delimeters like this:

/([2-9]d{2}) [2-9]d{2}-d{4}/

Given the first character typed is a slash, you could defer the incremental results until an unescaped trailing slash is seen.

Alternatively, you could add a checkbox for "show incremental results", defaulting to checked, and let the user turn it off if they don't want to see it. Many times, I build up RegEx's in small parts as I hone in on what I'm really looking for, so seeing the intermediate results could actually be a feature.

By: Dick Kusleika

Dick Kusleika — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 21:54:00 +0000

Didn’t see anything for font-color, but changed from .9 to 1.2 em. Looks better to me, but let me know what you think.

By: Dick Kusleika

Dick Kusleika — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 21:47:00 +0000

Currently, it does not display real-time if there are over half a million cells. In that case it only displays when you exit the textbox. Maybe a ‘go’ button would be clearer. And I could use the same thing for regex – just act like it’s too many cells.

What browser do you use Jon? It’s clear for me on FF and IE. Maybe my eyes are only 40 years old. I’ll check the style sheet and fix it up.

By: David Onder

David Onder — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:32:00 +0000

This could be very useful. I wonder if putting a checkbox on the form and then if the option is checked, show nothing until there is something to show. The checkbox also allow, in the very rare instance, the user to search for rx:.

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 14:59:00 +0000

In the textbox change event, if the text begins with "r", "rx", or "rx:", have it skip the update, but display a small button next to the textbox that says "Go".

PS. The small light gray text on white in your table is illegible.