Kiki regex crunching ferret

Intro

Description Features Issues Requirements

Description

Kiki is a free environment for regular expression testing (ferret). It allows you to write regexes and test them against a sample text, providing extensive output about the results. It is useful for several purposes:

exploring and understanding the structure of match objects generated by the re module, making Kiki a valuable tool for people new to regexes
testing regexes on sample text before deploying them in code

Kiki can function on its own or as plugin for the Spe Python editor (it is included in the Spe download so you don't have to get Kiki separately if you already have Spe).

Features

Kiki 0.5.6 has the following features:

history of used regexes
automatic session saving and restoring
all regex compilation flags are available
built-in documentation of the Python re module
highlighting of groups inside a match using colored parentheses
ability to highlight only the first, or all matches in the sample text
stores everything in plain text (as Python data structures, no registry use under Windows)
all options are stored on a per-user basis. In other words, it should be enough to install one copy of Kiki on a computer and have that copy be used by different users with different preferences and feeds. Kiki running from Spe uses a different save diretory than Kiki running standalone.
no ads, no nags, free, open source (GPL) and fully cross-platform

Issues

There are no known issues. Feel free to contact me to request a feature or report a bug.

Requirements

Kiki should work on any computer where Python and wxPython can run. I use it on a day-to-day basis on Windows XP and I've done some rudimentary testing on my Mandrake 9.2rc2, but as far as I know there is no OS-specific code in it so it should work quite ok on Windows 9x/ME/NT/XP as well as all Linux flavours, OS X and possibly some exotic systems.

If your operating system does not come with Python installed (Linux distro's usually do include Python, but Windows systems don't) or you have an old version like the ones delivered by RedHat in releases below 8.0, you can get a Python distribution for your operating system at Python.org (or you can use the direct links on the Download page). I think Kiki should work with any version starting with 2.0, but I have only tested it on 2.3.

wxPython is available from wxPython.org. I always develop/test with and run on the latest wxPython available.