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Latest Issue of the
Just Great Software Newsletter

April 2008

Contents

1. Updated: RegexBuddy 3.1.1

2. New: EditPad Lite and Pro in French

3. Tips & Tricks: Validate XML Files in EditPad Pro

4. New: Micro-ISV.asia

Updated: RegexBuddy 3.1.1

RegexBuddy 3.1.1 is now available for download. This free update brings quite a number of fixes and improvements.

Two new command line parameters -flavor and -flavorreplace allow you to specify the flavor that RegexBuddy should default to. These parameters are intended to be used with the -getfromclipboard parameter. E.g. "RegexBuddy.exe -getfromclipboard -flavor pcre -string c" makes RegexBuddy treat the text on the clipboard as a PCRE regex formatted as a C or C++ string.

RegexBuddy's installer can now install RegexBuddy directly onto a removable drive. Simply click the Create Portable Installation button and follow the steps. The Install on Removable Drive item in the Help was renamed to Create Portable Installation for consistency. So if you only use RegexBuddy in a portable manner, you can now install it directly that way. If you run it both off your hard disk and off a removable device, you can still use the item in the Help menu to copy your installation.

On the Use tab, you can now select wxWidgets among the languages. This template generates C++ source code snippets that use the wxRegEx class from the wxWidgets library. This class encapsulates the ARE engine originally developed for Tcl. This regex flavor is labeled Tcl ARE in RegexBuddy. The PHP preg template has a new function to search-and-replace through a string using the preg_replace_callback() function.

The HTML export on the Create tab was improved. The resulting HTML now uses a bit of JavaScript to resize the regex tree, so everything will fit into the browser window. Free-spacing regular expressions are now exported with their spacing intact as well. On the Test tab, the status of the "update automatically" setting is now remembered when the option to preserve the test subject is turned on in the preferences. The command last used is not remembered, so you still need to select a command like List All for automatic updating to begin. On the Use tab, backslashes that needlessly escape literal characters such as % are now automatically stripped from the regular expression in the source code snippet. This makes sure your source code isn't needlessly infested with an army of backslashes when those needless backslashes are doubled-up to format your regex as a string.

Speaking of backslashes, two bugs involving them were fixed. If a regular expression contained an escaped forward slash, RegexBuddy escaped the backslash when formatting the regex as a JavaScript or Ruby // operator. RegexBuddy did not emulate the fact that the .NET engine treats \_ as an error. Most regex flavors treat escaped letters that don't form a metacharacter as an error, but treat an escaped underscore as a literal. The .NET flavor treats the underscore like a letter.

Other flavor-specific bugs were fixed as well. RegexBuddy required all literal hyphens inside character classes to be escaped for flavors that treat [\d-z] as an error (since 3.0.4). This was overly restrictive. E.g. [---] is still valid with these flavors. For Perl and Python, which only support fixed-length lookbehind, RegexBuddy now treats alternation inside lookbehind as an error, like Perl and Python do. Python and PCRE do not allow two named capturing groups to use the same name, unlike the .NET and JGsoft flavors. RegexBuddy now emulates this restriction for Python and PCRE. The Alternation item in the Insert Token menu was disabled for the GNU BRE flavor, which supports alternation through \|.

RegexBuddy's own regex engine now handles certain corner cases better. \X to match a Unicode grapheme was not backtracked properly, causing a regex like \X+ a to fail on graphemes consisting of more than one Unicode code point. This could only happen on Unicode files that use combining marks, which is rare. A regex that started with a lookbehind immediately followed by an infinitely repeated dot would fail to match on the Test tab if "dot matches newlines" is on. Conditionals referencing a capturing group defined after the conditional and without a "then" part did not work correctly (new feature in 3.1.0). Mode modifiers using the (?i) syntax did not work correctly inside lookaround. RegexBuddy's regex engine did not detect catastrophic backtracking when the regex (a|aa)+b is applied to a long string of "a" characters.

Several fixes were made to the Test tab. If a regex started with consecutive literal characters, like bbc or b{2}c, RegexBuddy would match them incorrectly if the test subject used a character encoding that uses a variable number of bytes per character (like UTF-8 or DBCS). List All Group Matches in Columns did not indicate named capturing groups in the header. RegexBuddy would sometimes lock up when editing the test subject while a "list all" or similar command was still busy with the test subject. Testing a regex with an empty alternative like one||three caused an error about an empty alternative. Though empty alternatives don't make sense, they're not an error. The Create tab and syntax highlighting will still show a warning.

Please see http://www.regexbuddy.com/history.html for a complete version history.

If you have already purchased or upgraded to RegexBuddy 3, you can download this free update for free at http://www.regexbuddy.com/download.html

Version 3 is a major upgrade. If you own RegexBuddy 2, go to http://www.regexbuddy.com/upgradenow.html to purchase this new version at a significant discount (US$ 19.95 for a single user license). If you did not yet buy RegexBuddy, you can get your copy now at http://www.regexbuddy.com/buynow.html for US$ 39.95.

New: Updated: EditPad Lite and Pro in French

Thanks to the hard work of Pietro Colok of Colok Traductions (http://www.colok-traductions.com/), the latest versions of EditPad Lite and Pro are now available in the French language. If you have previously purchased EditPad Pro 6, you can go to http://www.editpadpro.com/fr.html to download the French version with the user ID you already have. At http://www.editpadpro.com/languages.html you can find links to all the other languages that EditPad is available in.

As a small company, we do not have the resources to translate our software into many languages. We therefore rely on volunteers to make the translations for us. If you would like to translate EditPad into your language, please send a note to the EditPad technical support address.

Tips & Tricks: Validate XML Files in EditPad Pro

EditPad Pro's Tools menu provides lots of flexible options for invoking external applications on the files you're editing. The file http://download.jgsoft.com/editpad/tools.zip contains a bunch of example tool configurations.

Today I've added the cleverly named XMLValidatorTool.exe to that download. This is a small console application that uses the .NET framework's XML classes to validate an XML file. It requires version 1.1 or later of the .NET framework to run. C# code is included. You can import the two .ini files via Tools|Configure Tools. You'll have to edit them to point them to the location of XMLValidatorTool.exe. You'll also have to point the one using a schema to the schema file you want to use. Hold down Ctrl while clicking on the New button in the tool configuration to clone it. That way you can easily add configurations for multiple schemas. The XMLValidatorTool.jgcscs file is a syntax coloring scheme that highlights the output from XMLValidatorTool.exe.

New: Micro-ISV.asia

Since you're reading the Just Great Software newsletter, you're likely already familiar with my business and its products. But unless you're running your own Micro-ISV, you probably don't know much about what goes on behind the scenes. If you're curious about that, feel free to subscribe to my new blog: http://www.micro-isv.asia

Over eight years of running my own small software business, I've gained quite a bit of experience in developing and publishing software. I have shared some of my opinions over the years in newsgroups, at conferences and on my old blog. But I've never written about the wonderful world of independent software development with any consistency. This new blog fixes that.

At Micro-ISV.asia I'll publish my opinions about current events and best practices for Micro-ISVs, and write about stuff I'm cooking up myself at Just Great Software. The main audience for this blog are obviously all the other Micro-ISVs out there, people who are thinking about starting their own software business, as well as people with general interest in the industry.

If you're a Just Great Software customer, this blog will give you a glimpse inside the sausage factory. But for regular product updates, keep your subscription to the Just Great Software newsletter which you are reading right now.

That's it for this month. Thank you for using our software, and see you next month!

Kind regards,

Jan Goyvaerts

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