This is for you, glazou, and your Diavolo editor. (Though I wrote it for Verbosio as well – I need it too.)

As I started my vacation, I was thinking, “I’d like to edit regular expressions in Mozilla. But I don’t want to edit one at a time. I want to edit a bunch, and see what they all do to a bunch of text.”

So in four late-night hours, I put together a simple XBL binding to help me do just that:

• XBL: A regular expression editing grid
• Bindings to XBL: CSS content rules
• Test file: regexpTest.xul

Each keystroke updates the table. When a regular expression is not well-formed, it disappears (and the results fields under it). When text and regular expression don’t match, the cell they share goes blank. The rest of the UI is, I hope, fairly self-explanatory for anyone familiar with JS regexps.

Yes, I know it’s not localized, and it’s not pretty. It’s functional, though, and for proof-of-concept code, that’s all I care about.

You may also notice this is on the new hg.mozdev.org repository. I’m in the process of converting over from CVS to Mercurial, and doing some other clean-up as well.