You might want to skip this first paragraph if you are just looking for the RegEx Tools portion.

I still find it amazing how the web can create an online social inner-networking that bobs and weaves an amazing web of connections (confused?  me too).  Here’s what led me to find these wonderful RegEx tools.  So the Microsoft Partner Program has an initiative that gave me a bunch of certifications vouchers.  I am using at least 1, possibly 2, in my giveaway.  I send out an email to the VB Insider’s List (an invite only listserv for Visual Basic users).  This leads Chris Love to leave a comment on my blog.  I then visit his blog and come across a posting for a bunch of RegEx tools.  This posting leads me to Ray Osherove’s blog, whom I’ve heard of but never had a chance to look into.  Ray has created a bunch of tools, particularly 3 RegEx tools that look outstanding.

In the software that I sell to a niche market, I use RegEx to parse through long streams of text.  Some of the RegEx strings I use are in excess of over 600 characters.  So when I find a RegEx tool, I’m super excited about it.  Ray Osherove has created several different tools to help in this area.  I hope you find these as useful as I will.

RegEx Visualizer - Allows creating “Debug Visualizers” for all types in .NET framework as well as custom types. You can find such visualizers for Datasets, strings and XML, now there’s one for RegEx
http://tools.osherove.com/CoolTools/RegexVisualizerKit/tabid/187/Default.aspx

The Regulator - Allows you to build and verify a regular expression against any text input, file or web, and displays matching, splitting or replacement results within an easy to understand, hierarchical tree.
http://tools.osherove.com/CoolTools/TheRegulator/tabid/185/Default.aspx

Regulazy - Visual Regex Creation tool for beginners.  It contains an easy “point and click” user interface, and allows creating regular expressions for simple searches almost instantly without requiring Regex syntax knowledge from the end user!
http://tools.osherove.com/CoolTools/Regulazy/tabid/182/Default.aspx