NAME
redet - regular expression development and execution tool
SYNOPSIS
redet <options> [<input file>]
DESCRIPTION
redet allows the user to construct regular expressions and test them
against input data by executing any of a variety of search programs,
editors, and programming languages that make use of regular
expressions. When a suitable regular expression has been constructed it
may be saved to a file.
Redet currently supports over fifty different programs and regular
expression libraries. These include multiple versions of grep, several
editors (Ed, Emacs, Sed, Vim), all the popular scripting languages
(Awk, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl) and some less popular ones (Lua, Pike,
Rebol), most shells (Bash, Ksh, Tcsh, Zsh) and various other languages,
including Guile, Icon and Java.
For each program, a palette showing the available regular expression
syntax is provided. Selections from the palette may be copied to the
regular expression window with a mouse click. Users may add their own
definitions to the palette via their initialization file. Redet also
keeps a list of the regular expressions executed, from which entries
may be copied back into the regular expression under construction. The
history list is saved to a file and restored on startup, so it persists
across sessions.
Redet provides both regular expression matching and substitution so
long as the underlying program does.
Although Redet is primarily an interface for other programs, it adds
some features of its own. It is possible to define named character
classes within Redet and to intersect them. This allows provides a
means of searching on feature matrices.
So long as the underlying program supports Unicode, redet allows UTF-8
Unicode in both test data and regular expressions. Several tools
provide additional support for Unicode use. These include popup lists
of Unicode ranges and general character properties, a widget for
entering characters by their numerical code, and widgets for entering
International Phonetic Alphabet characters, widgets for entering
letters with a variety of accents and other diacritics. Although
internal operations are entirely in Unicode, test data, comparison
data, and results may be read and written in any encoding supported by
Tcl/Tk. Redet is fully internationalized. If a suitable message
catalogue is provided, the interface may be made available in any
language and writing system supported by Unicode for which the
necessary fonts are available.
For usage information, execute redet with the command line flag -h.
Full information about redet is available from the reference manual,
which consists of a set of web pages. The master copy is located at:
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~wjposer/RedetManual/Manual.html. The entry
Illustrated Web Manual on the Help menu will take you to the master
manual page. The manual pages are packaged with every copy of Redet.
OPTIONS
-c <file name>
read character class definitions from the named file
-d set the debug flag. This causes additional information to be
printed during program execution. It is mostly useful for
developers.
-F <filename>
read a feature list from <filename>
-f act as a filter. This means that input is read from the standard
input and output written to the standard output.
-H do not read the history file
-h print this help information
-I <file>
read <file> as the initialization file
-i do not read the initialization file
-n do not execute feature tests on startup
-P list the programs supported and indicate which are available
-p <program>
use the named program
-s start up in substitution mode
-t show the results of feature tests
-v print the program name and version, then exit
SEE ALSO
awk (1), ed (1),grep (1), perl (1), sed (1)
AUTHOR
Bill Poser (billposer@alum.mit.edu)
LICENSE
GNU General Public License (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt),
version 2.