iNode: Nota Bene

I'm writing a lot of regular expressions at the moment, as part of the Quill input language parser in Ruby, and every now and then I get visual overload trying to debug them!

So I hunted for some visualisation tools – and discovered the excellent reAnimator from Oliver Steele.

This excellent tool deconstructs your regexp into two graphs – one for the deterministic solution, and one for the non-deterministic one. You then get to input the match text, and the graphs animate character-by-character …

a*b|b*a with input of ‘a’