As a (mainly) Perl developer I often have to write scripts involving regular expressions. As anyone knows that has worked with these before, they can be amazing helpful... and amazingly frustrating.

On one my many trawlings of the interweb I can across this perl module: YAPE::Regex::Explain (it's CPAN description page can be found at http://search.cpan.org/~pinyan/YAPE-Regex-Explain-3.011/Explain.pm ) I found this module so useful, I knocked up a simple CGI script that allows users to get their Regular expressions explained online, this can be found here: http://www.hampsonism.co.uk/regexp.cgi.

After mentioning this at work, one of my senior colleagues (a gentleman MUCH cleverer than myself) pointed us at a tool, Rugular Expression Coach (found here: http://weitz.de/regex-coach/) which by far surpasses my own little tool. I believed that it deserved a little more publicity, hence this blog post (my firt for quite a while in fact), to bring a little more light to the sterling work they are doing.