Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on a Flex project where I’ve had to make heavy use of regular expressions. As always seems to happen when I work with regular expressions in any language, I found that one of the more complex parts of the process was just figuring out the exact regular expression pattern to use.

Having been down this road before with other languages, I decided to put together a simple tool for testing out regular expressions. I wanted to be able to enter a pattern and a test string, and have it check to see if it was a match. That way, I could test out various possible good matches (and non-matches) to see if they give the right result. I was using named capturing groups quite a bit on this project, so I added an extra feature where it shows all the groups that are captured as well.

Anyway, I realized this might be useful for anyone who’s trying to use regular expressions in an ActionScript 3.0 project, so I thought I’d make it available.

Want to test it out? Visit the project page to see the tool and download the source code.

If you have comments or improvements for the project, feel free to add a note in the comments on the project page.