A tool to test regular expressions against target strings for Linux operating systems (or any system that supports GTK 3).
Aside from being useful, this code showcases several poorly-documented features of GTK 3 that may be of interest to some. Namely:
- the API to implement custom drawing (including geometry management and invoking libcairo)
- how to set attributes on widgets that are ignored by the CSS styler (letter-spacing, for example)
- which properties are allowed on what widget and how to write an XML UI definition file
- examples of queueing draw operations on a widget manually to keep all widgets up-to-date
The most interesting take-away is probably this: the GtkStyleProvider in the form of a CSS styler works
very poorly. For serious applications, using libpango is a must. Also, for anyone who wishes to implement
anything beyond the most basic user interfaces, custom drawing (and associated libcairo) is another must.
Therefore, the GTK 3 documentation is as good as useless beyond being a reference for function declarations,
signal declarations, and property lists.
Type a regular expression into the top text widget. The status box will turn green for valid regular expressions (as defined by POSIX) and red for invalid regular expressions.
Type a target string into the bottom box. All matches, as computed by regexec, will be highlighted in a green box with a blue border.
The empty string is never matched.
- Add a list view that allows saving regular expressions of interest. Allow output to a text file.
- Add a Java mode which runs a Java program in daemon mode that tests regular expressions as defined in java.util.regex.
- Write a custom
regcomp--one that does not allow nonsense regular expressions like "ab+*".
