Regular expressions are plain and simple an enormous headache – but man when you get them to work for you then they are the most powerful guns known to any string-manipulating madman out there.

By now of course there are plenty of great tools to run and test and flex your regular expression muscle out there, floating around on the Net, but you can now safely add a new cat to the bag with the release of the platform independent RegExr, built on the Adobe Air platform using the wonder that is Flex 3.

Grant Skinner’s little gskinner group have slapped together a great little Adobe Air app that allows you to play around with regular expressions to your heart’s content, but at the same time provides you with some great sample data and tutorial information in order to increase your regex knowledge, as well as a nifty little community feature that allows you to save and share your regex recipes with other like-minded madmen out there.

It’s a fantastic little desktop tool that runs equally well on Ubuntu, Windows or a Mac, and if you’re too lazy to download the desktop application, you can even run it straight from your browser at http://gskinner.com/RegExr/.

To download/install the far more nifty Adobe Air app though, browse through to the mobile ready site at http://www.gskinner.com/RegExr/desktop/

Enjoy.

Related Link: http://www.gskinner.com/RegExr/desktop/