RegexMagic Regular Expression Generator

RegexMagic makes creating regular expressions easier than ever. While other regex tools such as RegexBuddy merely make it easier to work with regular expressions, with RegexMagic you don’t have to deal with the regular expression syntax at all. RegexMagic generates complete regular expressions to your specifications.

First, you provide RegexMagic with some samples of the text you want your regular expression to match. RegexMagic can automatically detect what sort of pattern your text looks like. Numbers, dates, and email addresses are just a few examples of the wide range of patterns that RegexMagic supports. By marking different parts of your samples, you can create regular expressions that combine multiple patterns to match exactly what you want. RegexMagic’s patterns provide many options, so you can make your regular expression as loose or as strict as you want.

Best of all, RegexMagic supports nearly all popular regular expression flavors. Select your flavor, and RegexMagic makes sure to generate a regular expression that works with it. RegexMagic can even generate snippets in many programming languages that you can copy and paste directly into your source code to implement your regular expression.

RegexMagic doesn’t automatically generate regular expressions on magic alone. But it sure makes things a lot easier by allowing you to work with your data instead of the cryptic regex syntax.

Both RegexBuddy and RegexMagic are designed to make it easy to create regular expressions. But the approach is totally different.

The main design goal behind RegexBuddy is to make it easy to learn and work with the regular expression syntax. RegexBuddy makes no attempt to shield you from the complexities of regular expressions. Instead, it tries to make your life easier by clearly explaining and showing you how a regex works, or doesn’t. As such, RegexBuddy is primarily of interest to people who already know or who want to learn the ins and outs of regular expressions. Complete beginners can use RegexBuddy, but there will be a learning curve.

RegexMagic has the opposite goal. With RegexMagic, you don’t deal with the regular expression syntax at all. Instead, you work with high-level RegexMagic “patterns” to tell RegexMagic what you want. RegexMagic generates complete regular expressions for you. As such, RegexMagic is primarily of interest to people who want to quickly generate regular expressions, without learning (much) about regular expressions as a technology. Experts will find RegexMagic useful for specific tasks such as generating a regex that matches numbers between 256 and 512. There’s nothing difficult about the regex 51[0-2]|50[0-9]|[34][0-9]{2}|2[6-9][0-9]|25[6-9], but unless you use RegexMagic, it is a chore to create.

The best deal is of course to get both products. Use RegexMagic to generate new regular expressions from scratch. RegexMagic makes that far easier than RegexBuddy. Use RegexBuddy to edit regular expressions written by other people. You can paste any regular expression into RegexBuddy, even if it’s formatted as a literal string or regex in source code. RegexMagic cannot edit existing regular expressions, unless they were generated with RegexMagic and you have the RegexMagic file for them.