Ubuntu Manpage: redet - regular expression development and execution tool

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

AUTHOR

       Bill Poser (billposer@alum.mit.edu)

LICENSE