I can see the claimed advantages to what's proposed, but I feel like if the railroad diagram by RegExper could be reversed, that that would be a far more successful visual syntax for regular expressions. Then again, most of my regex-fu entails building a regex relatively close to what I want and then repeatedly throwing it at a local instance of RegExper and test strings until I have something which accomplishes what I'm looking for it to do. I'd definitely fall outside the "true regex superheroes" category.
Anyway, to simplify what I have in mind for us less-than-experts, it'd be neat if someone could put together a railroad diagram of a regular expression that would then be compiled as the regex itself.
That being said, I don't have the presence of mind right now to determine if two different regexes can result in the same diagram in RegExper. If so, that kinda thoroughly breaks my idea.
> most of my regex-fu entails building a regex relatively close to what I want and then repeatedly throwing it at a local instance of RegExper and test strings until I have something which accomplishes what I'm looking for it to do.
> I'd definitely fall outside the "true regex superheroes" category.
I think you just gave the definition of "true regex superhero". Best regex programmers I know have a similar workflow.
Anyway, to simplify what I have in mind for us less-than-experts, it'd be neat if someone could put together a railroad diagram of a regular expression that would then be compiled as the regex itself.
That being said, I don't have the presence of mind right now to determine if two different regexes can result in the same diagram in RegExper. If so, that kinda thoroughly breaks my idea.