I really appreciate what Regex Coach has done for honing my Regular Expressions skills, and assisting debugging of complex expressions.

 

I frequently wish to optimize regular expressions (mainly by reducing possible backtracking http://www.regular-expressions.info/atomic.html), but lack a way to test the relative performance between different regular expressions.

 

To measure performance of a given regexp, I would really like the possibility of having Regex Coach count the total number of steps used by the underlying regexp engine for a given regexp search, or some other meaningful performance indicator.

This could possibly be displayed when pressing the ">>" (show next match) button (regardless of whether a match was found or not). This way, you can quickly try out different matching approaches, and get an indication of the relative performance.

 

Rgds,