grex

grex is a small command-line utility that is meant to simplify the often complicated and tedious task of creating regular expressions. It does so by automatically generating regular expressions from user-provided input strings that match the generated expression.

In its very early stage, this tool is a Rust port of regexgen which has been implemented in JavaScript and runs in a Node.js environment. The plan is, however, to add much more functionality to grex than regexgen provides. The development of the latter was ceased more than two years ago. Compared to regexgen, grex is currently lacking support for character classes. This feature will be added in the next version.

Features

• literals
• detection of common prefixes and suffixes
• alternation using | operator
• repetition using ? quantifier
• concatenation of all of the former

How to use

$ grex -h
grex 0.1.0
Peter M. Stahl <[email protected]>
grex generates regular expressions that match user-provided input strings.

USAGE:
    grex <input>...

FLAGS:
    -h, --help       Prints help information
    -V, --version    Prints version information

ARGS:
    <input>... 

Some examples

$ grex abc def
abc|def

$ grex a ab abc
a(bc?)?

$ grex thankful thoughtful
th(ought|ank)ful

$ grex 2.0-3.5 2.5-6.0
2\.(0\-3\.5|5\-6\.0)