I don't know of any software that translates regular expressions, either, though I'm sure I can't be the first.
4th result on google for "regex conversion" for me. Seems like there are quite a few others.
Railroad diagrams are also called syntax diagrams [1] and were used in print as early as 1973 [2]. They are an obvious kind of diagram to use for regular expressions, which express a grammar/syntax.
Basically, many people will have had the idea, independently, because representing a regex as a railroad diagram is an obvious invention, as is converting them between variants. Doing these on demand is also obvious.
Trying to take some sort of credit (even as inspiration) for other people's work is not likely to make you many friends. The world is a vast place with many things going on independently. Keep on inventing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax_diagram [2] Niklaus Wirth: The Programming Language Pascal. (July 1973)
It's even worse: those strfriend URLs in the form of
http://strfriend.com/vis?re=(Zip%3A\s*\d\d\d\d\d)\s*(State%3...
are really painful.You'll have to encode almost everything in it. See my edit.* Works now, but not worth it IMO.
str friend? more like str ENEMY.
These days there’s a lot more tooling and components that can snap together to make this kind of thing.
Depends on what you count as dynamic, but I think so yes. There was one in use at my Uni ~2000. Obviously there were no fancy canvas/svg options to work with client-side (though IIRC flash was very much a thing by then so that could have been used) so it produced an image server-side that was updated when you submitted a change.
Not entirely dynamic due to the manual post to the server for each update of the diagram, but it counts IMO. It could have been more automated via the JS/Dom methods available at the time I'm sure, I can think of a couple of ways, but I don't remember it being so.
> He may have been the first.
I'd say not the first. He may well have come up with the combination of ideas independently. How many times have you thought "X would be brilliant, I'm a genius" only to find when describing the idea to other that several "geniuses" preempted you and it already exists (or worse: it has been tried and proven to be a terrible idea in practice)! It has certainly happened to me a fair few times, and back then it wouldn't have been as easy to search out similar ideas/implementations.
My initial implementation was strfriend.com (in Lisp: well under 1,000 lines, including views), and I think its main claim to fame was that Jeff Atwood made fun of it on Twitter. (I was truly clueless at promoting myself back then. Not only did I not have a Twitter account, but it didn't occur to me to submit it to HN.)
Every so often, I toy around with the idea of making it into a proper local/native application -- maybe someday. In the meantime, my obsession with regular expressions lives on in my current application (see bio) where I parse and rewrite the user's entered regex syntax (ICU) into whatever regex syntax the backend requires. I don't know of any other application that does this, but I predict that in 15 years it'll be commonplace (and I'll still be poor)!