Regexper – Regular expressions visualizer

Re:Regexper – Regular expressions visualizer by kyberias on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @02:50PM (#16268370)

I was taught the algorithms to do this stuff in my Computer Science class over 20 years ago (RE is equivalent to DFA). You weren't the first person to implement regular expression visualizations.

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Re:Regexper – Regular expressions visualizer by skate22 on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @03:05PM (#16268514)

A dynamic visualization on the web 13 years ago? He may have been the first.

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Re:Regexper – Regular expressions visualizer by osteele on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @09:42PM (#16270908)

It was pretty hard to do viz on the web 13 years ago. In 2006 I made a web tool to turn regular expressions into NFAs and DFAs and animate their states as you typed. It took a lot of code (drawing and animating along beziers, AJAX to a server for graphviz and a regex compilation and minimization package I wrote for this). https://imgur.com/gallery/Yqqoh

These days there’s a lot more tooling and components that can snap together to make this kind of thing.

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Re:Regexper – Regular expressions visualizer by dspillett on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @05:26AM (#16272865)

> A dynamic visualization on the web 13 years ago?

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.

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Re:Regexper – Regular expressions visualizer by ken on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @12:40AM (#16271711)

I studied computer science, too. DFA graphs are not the same as railroad diagrams.

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