--- title: "Introducing Regulazy: Point & Click Regular Expression" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2006/7/9/introducing-regulazy-point-click-regular-expression.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2006/7/9/introducing-regulazy-point-click-regular-expression.html" published: "2006-07-09T17:36:00" updated: "2006-07-09T17:36:00" tags: ["CLR", "Community News", "General Software Devel..."] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Regulazy is an attempt to build a small “Expert System” for creating .NET Regular Expressions. It lets the user create an expression based on a real life example of text they would like to parse. As the user interacts…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Introducing Regulazy: Point & Click Regular Expression By Roy Osherove July 9, 2006 In [CLR](https://osherove.com/blog/category/clr), [Community News](https://osherove.com/blog/category/community-news), [General Software Devel...](https://osherove.com/blog/category/general-software-devel) **Historical article** · Originally published July 9, 2006; technical details may be outdated. [**Regulazy**](https://osherove.com/) is an attempt to build a small “Expert System” for creating .NET Regular Expressions. It lets the user create an expression based on a real life example of text they would like to parse. As the user interacts with Regulazy using the mouse, Regulazy offers the user possible expressions that would fit the currently selected text. As the user selects “rules” to apply on various parts of the text, a regular expression is built automatically in the lower application pane. The end result is **a visual expression builder**, that for most simple parsing operations, requires the user only to know what they would like to parse, and what the parsing rules should be - Regex Syntax is \*not\* needed. ![](https://osherove.com/img/sq/1000w-RegulazyDemo.gif) The current version is an **alpha** \- It’s  stable, but there are many bugs yet to be found. The version will work until August 10th 2006. Then you’ll have to download a new version. You can find more tools I’ve built over at [/tools/](https://osherove.com/tools/)  This was not an attempt to built a better [Regulator](https://osherove.com/), but instead, a better experience for the developer. If you need to build a complex Regex with multiple options for text inside it and such, this is not(yet) the tool you’d want to use - it supports the most basic options, and tries to solve the %80 case secnario for such simple parsing operations. I hope you guys like it. It was also my first shot at working with the GDI+ system (and it shows in some places, too), in an attempt to build something with a totally different interface for building something on top of text. **Test-Driven Development** This tool was also built using test-driven development for most of the code (Only small parts of the UI components were tested though - all the logic exists in libraries that are well tested. It was a fun experience working alone on this, and making changes constantly to the design of the code. The more complex the logic became, the more glad I was that I had tests to make sure everything still works as advertised. **Helpful Tools** I’m also using [SmartAssembly](http://www.smartassembly.com/) to obfuscate the code, link all referenced assemblies and provide a global error handling mechanism that allows you guys to upload application crash reports that I can later analyze. I’ve reviewed that tool before, but version 1.1 of it really rocks the boat. Recommended. I’m also hosting a [FogBugz](http://www.fogbugz.com/) application over on [www.fogbugzhosting.com](http://www.fogbugzhosting.com/) . So if you find any bugs or think of a missing feature (and there are many, I know) , you can let me know at [http://bugz.osherove.com](http://bugz.osherove.com/) . ## More in CLR [All posts in CLR](https://osherove.com/blog/category/clr) - Nov 29, 2007 ### [IL Debug Visualizer for Compiled Lambda Expressions, MethodBase and DynamicMethod](https://osherove.com/blog/2007/11/29/il-debug-visualizer-for-compiled-lambda-expressions-methodba.html) - Sep 27, 2007 ### [Things I learned at JAOO 2007](https://osherove.com/blog/2007/9/27/things-i-learned-at-jaoo-2007.html) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/