On Sun, 5 Nov 2006 03:30:35 -0500, Charlie Hayes cosmotic@cybercoment.com wrote:
My friend was using it on some HTML, basically parsing out the decimal values from a table. Sorry I cant give you the exact strings. He's on XP pro and the latest version as of a week ago. It was pretty definite that it would freeze up, if he used it for more than one minute it would freeze up. He did some drag-selecting inside the regex box that seemed to cause repeated evaluations.
That sounds like the result of a complicated/inefficient regular expression. Without the exact strings it's hard to say. It frequently happens that people who don't have much experience with regular expressions end up building regexes which force the machine into seemingly endless backtracking. (Note that this isn't a problem of Regex Coach but a general problem of regular expressions.)
I'd be happy to investigate this further, but I need a reproducable example first. I'm pretty sure the application doesn't have a memory leak.
As for the radio buttons, if there are more than 10 groups to extract, your out of luck. Also, you cant view the contents of the group without clicking on the radio button and then looking in the subject box.
It would be great if you made the group radio buttons into a list box that displayed the group index, start, end, length, and contents.
I've had similar requests already and my usual reply is that Regex Coach is an application you use to /experiment/ with regular expressions while you learn them. It is not intended to be a bulk regex tester for pro users. If you use it like that and it works for you, that's fine. If it doesn't, you probably have to resort to other apps. I'm told there is "competition" that can do that but costs money - haven't tried it, though.
He was getting over 10 groups, maybe thats what may have been causing the freeze ups.
The number of groups doesn't really matter for the performance - it matters how and if they are nested and if they contain repetitions.