retest

Retest is a regular expression tester that can be used in the terminal. It is meant to be a simple and quick utility to aid you in developing regular expressions. Like regular expressions 101, but in the terminal.

Features

• Piping! You can pipe a subject string to match against into standard input.
• Nested highlighting! If the regular expression contains groups and subgroups, they will be highlighted in different colors than the whole match.
• All matches! Retest finds all non-crossing matches in the subject string.
• List of matches! You can optionally display all matches as a formatted list, which includes the match order and the indexes in the string.

Would you like to suggest new features? Make an issue on GitHub describing the feature, or shoot me an email to ask me directly.

Install from release

Binaries for Linux are provided for each release and available on the releases page. Just download a "retest" binary and place it somewhere that is in your $PATH (like /usr/local/bin), and you're ready to go.

Compiling and installing from source

First, get the source code by cloning from GitHub:

$ git clone https://github.com/sagebind/retest.git
$ cd retest

You can install dependencies and compile all at once using cargo:

$ cargo build

A simple Makefile is also provided for easily installing and uninstalling retest. To install globally, you can follow the traditional Linux steps:

$ make
$ sudo make install

This will compile retest and place a globally available executable into /usr/local/bin. Similarly, you can uninstall retest with

$ sudo make uninstall

Usage

Retest accepts one regular expression as an argument, and then matches it against a subject string. The subject will be printed back out, with all matches found highlighted. For example:

$ echo 'fee fi fo fum' | retest 'f\w\w'

will output something like the following (text in square brackets would be highlighted):

[fee] fi fo [fum]

By default, the subject is read from standard input. If you'd like to specify the subject as an argument, you can use the --subject (or -s) option:

$ retest '\w+\s' --subject 'fee fi fo fum'

For more options and tricks, check the help message from the program:

$ retest --help

Where to get help

Need help? Just send me an email with your questions. Be sure to add "retest" to the message subject line so I know how I can help you out.

License

All documentation and source code is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (Apache-2.0). See the LICENSE file for details.