Patterns - The Regex App App Reviews

I am a full-time developer, living in multiple frameworks. Im pretty good at writing code, but pretty awful at regular expressions. Patterns has saved me several times, helping me write regular expressions as though I actually know what Im doing. Patterns is really simple, but it does what it sets out to perfectly–it helps dunces like me write decent regular expressions.

nice to have so many languages supported. does not reflect positions of matches in scrollbar - hard to find matches in large documents. does not offer option to show only lines with matches does not offer arrow keys for hopping from match to match. does not load the text area from a file.

This app works as advertised. It is very efficient and user friendly. The only feature I need is the ability to search the reference sheet. that would speed things along a bit.

Wow, Im so glad somebody else shares my bad eyesight. Most RegEx helper apps have ridiculously small font sizes for their UIs, and they rarely have syntax highlighting. Good job, Mr. Krill! Next up on my list of apps to buy is CodeRunner! Thanks again.

Patterns is an incredibly valuable and helpful tool, even if you are already pretty good at regular expressions. Saved me tons of time that was previously spent creating test scripts. Highly recommended.

Hands down, the best tool of its kind.

I have never been able to remember how to create complex regular expressions. Every single time I have to fiddle with things to make sure they are correct and Patterns makes it easy work. As others have stated, I would like to see a more appropriate app icon (the current icon looks like Spotlight).

The interface is nice and clean and everything seems to work, but I have two complaints. First, its unclear whether Patterns assumes Posix or PCRE syntax. Second, in Match mode, it doesnt display groups. You can figure out the groups by switching to Replace and writing the appropriate replacement expression, but it would be great to display the groups in the regular Match mode, as well.

Id REALLY like to see this app highlight bracketed matches uniquely so I can verify my sub-patterns are performing as anticipated. The ability to change the colors of highlighting depending on what part of the regex is selected would be nice too. more features would make this a 5.

This app makes dealing (and experimenting) with regexs very easy. The realtime updates, built-in cheat sheet, and especially the color coding for matches are a big help.

Excellent at twice the price: if you want a quick and easy tool for testing out regular expressions, get it. One small gripe: the cheat sheet is generic to most regular expression engines, so if a regex is working in Patterns but not in your code, thats possibly the case. (Looking at you, Python + POSIX regular expression classes)

An excellent way to create and debug regular expressions. I only have 2 wishes: there should be a C/C++ code generator that uses the PCRE library, and there should be some way to save regexes that I got to work along with a test string and a small note about what it does.

This tool just saved me an afternoon. Works well, does just what it says it does.

Ive been doing regex for years and no matter how much I work with it, theres always a need to make sure that what youre writing works. This tool does that perfectly. The best part? Once youve nailed down your regex, you can copy the code for a number of languages right to your copy/paste history. If you do any measure of regex and youre not using this tool, youre missing out.

Very nice. Needs sub-pattern highlighting though!

I bought this application based on the love affair I have with CodeRunner, but this one just misses the perfect mark. Seems like some of the valid regex Ive thrown into it dont validate and when copying code out of it in php code, it uses double quotes and escaped slashes which really nag my work flow since theyre not pretty and not efficient. The issues ive had with code runner are with character classes and utf-8 testing using p{L} type checks which never seem to validate. I want to love this app, and over time perhaps those features will also be added in, but right now its not the be all end all of regex testing, and in fact, i could probably do more with CodeRunner considering it ties into the libraries installed on my machine. Great for testing smaller simple regex, but doesnt quite pass muster when pitted against unicode.

Simple, easy to use to build and test your regular expressions. I see a quite a few feature requests in the reviews, but the ratings speak for themselves. Yes, it could have some more features, but it certainly delivers way more than $2.99 in value. Tusen Takk Nikolai!

I have tried numerous online regexp validation schemes, with very poor results. Imagine my surprise when within 5 minutes I had the answer to a usage that I had spent hours on, and still only had partial success. A greatly simplified regsub expression actually did what I was trying to do with something more complicated. The feedback is great for errors, and the response time is instantaneous for the result. Nice helpmate on one of the hardest to understand parts of coding. Its in my dock now.

Its so not worth my time to figure out the pattern I need. It is very worth the price of Patterns. Having a live preview of the effect on your data makes experimentation simple, and in fact I use regex much more now that I have a tool that takes the pain out and leaves the elegance.

I love this app and use is multiple time throughout my day. Thank you for the wonderful app. The only addition I would love is to have multiple windows open at once, only being able to have one Patterns window open at once seems a bit silly to me.