Portable Search and Replace Regular Expression Wizard

Designed as the portable counterpart of Search and Replace Regular Expression Wizard, this is a software utility with advanced options designed to help you debug regular expressions created by the Search and Replace tool. It caters to experienced PC users.

Portability perks

As there is no installation pack involved, you can save the program files in any part of the hard drive and just click the executable to launch Search and Replace Regular Expression Wizard. Otherwise, you can keep it stored on a USB flash drive and directly launch it on any PC effortlessly. It doesn't edit Windows registry settings.

Plain and simple interface

The tool doesn't put emphasis on looks, and the main application window is based on a wizard where you have to follow several steps to carry out a task.
You can get started by loading a text document from file, and preview its contents in the panel. Alternatively, you can paste Clipboard contents.

Configure settings to replace regular expressions

It's necessary to specify the regular expression to find, along with the one to replace it with, enable or disable case sensitive mode, and proceed to the next wizard step.
The app shows a sample text and lets you to select the expression type between exactly one occurrence, zero or more occurrences, one or more occurrences, a custom range of occurrences, start or end of line or file, as well as expression to match or avoid.

Preview the output and commit changes

A list with possible regex codes is displayed, so you can consult it to figure out which codes you want to apply to the text. You can add as many codes as you want, as well as arrange them in any order.
The next wizard stage reveals the replaced text and give you the possibility to edit the string of the expression type, and make it uppercase or lowercase. Right before completing the whole operation, you can review the source and output text, and either commit the changes or go back to make further adjustments.

Evaluation and conclusion

The software application worked smoothly in our tests, without causing the operating system to hang, crash or prompt error dialogs. It left a small footprint on system resources consumption, as it needed low CPU and RAM to work properly. Tasks were conducted rapidly.
On the other hand, the interface could use some improvements when it comes to looks and structure. We must also keep in mind that fact that it hasn't been updated for a long time. Otherwise, Search and Replace Regular Expression Wizard proves to be an effective utility for debugging regular expressions created by Search and Replace.