RegViz: visual debugging of regular expressions
Fabian Beck, Stefan Gulan, Benjamin Biegel, Sebastian Baltes, Daniel Weiskopf · 2014
Regular expressions are a widely used programming technique, but seem to be neglected by software engineering research. Encoding complex string parsing in a very compact notation, their complexity and compactness, however, introduce particular challenges with respect to program comprehension. In this paper, we present RegViz, an approach to visually augment regular expressions without changing their original textual notation. The visual encoding clarifies the structure of the regular expressions and clearly discerns included tokens by function. The approach also provides advanced visual highlighting of matches in a sample text and defining test cases therein. We implemented RegViz as a Web-based tool for JavaScript regular expressions. Expert feedback suggests that the approach is intuitive to apply and increases the readability of regular expressions.