txt2regex - Regular expression wizard for the command line

Txt2regex is a regular expression wizard for the command line.

Users with little or no knowledge of regular expressions can quickly create hairy regexes by answering questions in a simple text-based interactive interface.

Txt2regex is aware of the particular notation and caveats of many different regular expression flavors, generating valid regexes for more than 20 targets, including grep, sed, Vim, Emacs, JavaScript, Python, PHP, PostgreSQL.

Txt2regex is a one-file shell script made 100% with Bash builtin commands. The only requirement is Bash itself, since no grep, find, sed or any other system command is used.

Download: txt2regex 0.9 (released May 21, 2020) - Changelog

License: GPLv2

Doc: Manual Page

GitHub: https://github.com/aureliojargas/txt2regex

Supported targets (22)

Text editors:

ed
Emacs
vi
Vim

Tools:

AWK
egrep
expect
find
gawk
grep
lex
mawk
procmail
sed

Databases:

MySQL
PostgreSQL

Programming languages:

CHICKEN Scheme
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

Features

Support for POSIX classes, such as [:alpha:], [:lower:] and friends:

Support for groups, including nested groups and a nice balance control on the number of opened/closed groups:

Full support for localization, this is the Spanish translation:

Option --showmeta shows a complete table for all the supported metacharacters used in all the supported flavors:

$ ./txt2regex.sh --showmeta

awk             +      ?             |      ()    awk version 20121220
chicken         +      ?     {}      |      ()    CHICKEN 4.12.0
ed             \+     \?   \{\}     \|    \(\)    GNU Ed 1.10
egrep           +      ?     {}      |      ()    grep (GNU grep) 3.1
emacs           +      ? \\{\\}    \\|  \\(\\)    GNU Emacs 25.2.2
expect          +      ?     {}      |      ()    expect version 5.45.4
find            +      ?     {}      |      ()    find (GNU findutils) 4.7.0-git
gawk            +      ?     {}      |      ()    GNU Awk 4.1.4
grep           \+     \?   \{\}     \|    \(\)    grep (GNU grep) 3.1
javascript      +      ?     {}      |      ()    node v8.10.0
lex             +      ?     {}      |      ()    flex 2.6.4
mawk            +      ?             |      ()    mawk 1.3.3 Nov 1996
mysql           +      ?     {}      |      ()    mysql  Ver 14.14 Distrib 5.7.29
perl            +      ?     {}      |      ()    perl v5.26.1
php             +      ?     {}      |      ()    PHP 7.2.24-0ubuntu0.18.04.4
postgres        +      ?     {}      |      ()    psql (PostgreSQL) 10.12
procmail        +      ?             |      ()    procmail v3.23pre 2001/09/13
python          +      ?     {}      |      ()    Python 3.6.9
sed            \+     \?   \{\}     \|    \(\)    sed (GNU sed) 4.4
tcl             +      ?     {}      |      ()    tcl 8.6
vi                         \{\}           \(\)    nvi 1.81.6-13
vim            \+     \=    \{}     \|    \(\)    VIM - Vi IMproved 8.0 (2016 Sep 12)

NOTE: . [] [^] and * are the same on all programs.

$

Option --make shows handy ready-to-use regexes for common patterns, such as a regex to match a date:

$ ./txt2regex.sh --make date2

### date LEVEL 2: mm/dd/yyyy: matches from 00/00/1000 to 19/39/2999

 Regex python: [01][0-9]/[0123][0-9]/[12][0-9]{3}
 Regex egrep : [01][0-9]/[0123][0-9]/[12][0-9]{3}
 Regex grep  : [01][0-9]/[0123][0-9]/[12][0-9]\{3\}
 Regex sed   : [01][0-9]/[0123][0-9]/[12][0-9]\{3\}
 Regex vim   : [01][0-9]/[0123][0-9]/[12][0-9]\{3}
 Regex emacs : [01][0-9]/[0123][0-9]/[12][0-9]\\{3\\}

$

For a complete list of all the command line options and features, please see the following documents:

Packages

Txt2regex is a stand-alone Bash script, it doesn't need to be installed. But if you want to try it effortlessly using your package manager, it's available for some systems:

Magazine/site reviews

date	source	page	link
`Dez 2004`	Linux Magazine (Brazil)	82, 83	PDF (Portuguese)
`Oct 2004`	ComputerWoche.de site	-	Original review (German)
`Oct 2004`	Linux Magazine (International)	76, 77	PDF
`Set 2004`	Linux User (Germany)	66, 67	-
`Dec 2003`	Slashdot Japan	-	Original review (Japanese)
`Oct 2003`	Server Watch site	-	Original review
`May 2002`	ASCII's Linux Magazine	123	Scanned page (Japanese)
`Feb 2002`	UnixReview.com site	-	Original review
`Nov 2001`	ASCII's Linux Magazine	141	Scanned page (Japanese)
`Apr 2001`	Linux Format Magazine	47	Scanned page