NAME¶
redet - regular expression development and execution tool
SYNOPSIS¶
redet <options> [<input file>]
DESCRIPTION¶
redet allows the user to construct regular expressions and test them
against input data by executing any of a variety of search programs, editors,
and programming languages that make use of regular expressions. When a
suitable regular expression has been constructed it may be saved to a file.
Redet currently supports over fifty different programs and regular expression
libraries. These include multiple versions of grep, several editors (Ed,
Emacs, Sed, Vim), all the popular scripting languages (Awk, Perl, Python,
Ruby, Tcl) and some less popular ones (Lua, Pike, Rebol), most shells (Bash,
Ksh, Tcsh, Zsh) and various other languages, including Guile, Icon and Java.
For each program, a palette showing the available regular expression syntax is
provided. Selections from the palette may be copied to the regular expression
window with a mouse click. Users may add their own definitions to the palette
via their initialization file.
Redet also keeps a list of the regular
expressions executed, from which entries may be copied back into the regular
expression under construction. The history list is saved to a file and
restored on startup, so it persists across sessions.
Redet provides both regular expression matching and substitution so long
as the underlying program does.
Although
Redet is primarily an interface for other programs, it adds some
features of its own. It is possible to define named character classes within
Redet and to intersect them. This allows provides a means of searching
on feature matrices.
So long as the underlying program supports Unicode,
redet allows UTF-8
Unicode in both test data and regular expressions. Several tools provide
additional support for Unicode use. These include popup lists of Unicode
ranges and general character properties, a widget for entering characters by
their numerical code, and widgets for entering International Phonetic Alphabet
characters, widgets for entering letters with a variety of accents and other
diacritics. Although internal operations are entirely in Unicode, test data,
comparison data, and results may be read and written in any encoding supported
by Tcl/Tk.
Redet is fully internationalized. If a suitable message
catalogue is provided, the interface may be made available in any language and
writing system supported by Unicode for which the necessary fonts are
available.
For usage information, execute
redet with the command line flag -h.
Full information about
redet is available from the reference manual,
which consists of a set of web pages. The master copy is located at:
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~wjposer/RedetManual/Manual.html. The entry
Illustrated Web Manual on the
Help menu will take you to the
master manual page. The manual pages are packaged with every copy of Redet.
OPTIONS¶
- -c <file name>
- read character class definitions from the named file
- -d
- set the debug flag. This causes additional information to be printed
during program execution. It is mostly useful for developers.
- -F <filename>
- read a feature list from <filename>
- -f
- act as a filter. This means that input is read from the standard input and
output written to the standard output.
- -H
- do not read the history file
- -h
- print this help information
- -I <file>
- read <file> as the initialization file
- -i
- do not read the initialization file
- -n
- do not execute feature tests on startup
- -P
- list the programs supported and indicate which are available
- -p <program>
- use the named program
- -s
- start up in substitution mode
- -t
- show the results of feature tests
- -v
- print the program name and version, then exit
SEE ALSO¶
awk (1), ed (1),grep (1), perl (1), sed (1)
AUTHOR¶
Bill Poser (billposer@alum.mit.edu)
LICENSE¶
GNU General Public License (
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt), version
2.