Regex coach

\<!\[CDATA\[Swinging back into the geekiness we’ve all come to be used to from jurgen dot ca / jurgen id au, I’d like to present something I’m excited about, without even having **seen**  it. Gentle reader, I present to you [The Regex Coach.](http://www.weitz.de/regex-coach/)  Apparently, it allows the user to interactively see what various [regex](http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=regex&r=67)  strings do, what they do to data and why. I’m told it even translates regex into oddly funny English phrases. Problem for me is that it runs on Linux or Windows. My Linux machine sits at the office, behind a firewall. And it’s off. I’ll be downloading this baby on Monday. 

I love regex, but in kind of an abstract way. I’m still learning the finer points, but it’s saved my ass many times when I’ve had to do interesting find and replace functions across a lot of data. I reckon it will be more important in my day job as time goes on. I do, after all, work at a data cleansing company. Thanks to NTK for the link. ]>