Over the years I've come across a number of websites that provide regex testing. But it always seems like I'm looking at a "Perl Compatible Regular Expression" through PHP, or some other language's goggles. And while some of them offer a slick interface, they usually only tell whether or not there was a match, and possibly what got captured. They all felt quirky.

So I set out to create my own quirky implementation, but in a way that I consider more useful and applicable to Perl users. The Perl Regex Tester (Github repo).

Update (4-26-2013): The live app has moved to Heroku, since the DotCloud "free sandbox" plan has been discontinued. Live site: The Perl Regex Tester.

While the interface may be a bit Spartan -- no ajax, no flash, no fuss, it works pretty well (at least in my skewed assessment). And it provides the following features:

• A listing of all capture variables that apply: $<digits>, ${^PREMATCH}, @+, $+{name}, and so on.
• When the /g modifier is set, the regex will be evaluated in list context, and the list returned will also be displayed.
• The use re qw(debug) output is rendered, so you can see how the compilation of the regex progresses, and how "The Little Engine that Could('nt)" walks through the target string trying to match.
• A "Link to this test" link is displayed following any test. This allows you to capture the current test and link to it here or anywhere that you're trying to provide some instructional tutoring. Example: Here's a link to a test, written here as [http://...the long url...|Here's a link to a test].
• Quick links to Regex-relevant Perl POD.

The site is currently hosted in a dev account at Dotcloud, and consequently the URL is a little goofy. Someday it may move to a more friendly URL, but I"m taking a wait and see approach, as I'd like to be sure that I'm catching all the most significant pitfalls in executing user-supplied regexes first.

Some "gory details":

Please feel free to play around with it and use it. If you find a problem or want to request an additional feature, send me a message and I'll see what I can do.

Enjoy!

Csgrouper has been improved!

Thanks to the comments I could gather here and there (but mostly here), I have made some improvements in Csgrouper and now one can almost run it without knowing about Perl. Help balloons have been added, some bugs have been suppressed and most of all, Csound instruments are now loadable without having to mention params in any particular way. The window aspect has been simplified too.

Now I need someone of good will to help me correct my English in Help messages.

"Csgrouper is a music composition software at the intersection of polytonality, polymodality and serialism. Its aim is not to tell musicians how to compose, but to provide a permutational framework with scalable settings."

Announced today on the perl critic mailing list:

After a long hiatus, the Perl::Critic web service is back up at http://perlcritic.com

I suggest everyone glance thru it, even if you are not a beginner, as it contains much Perl wisdom and will bring you up-to-date with the ever-changing Perl world. I found simple and easy to understand explanations of many current Perl topics, like what is plack ?

Paul Johnson has a new web site showcasing his excellent Devel::Cover module. The new site shows code coverage statistics of selected CPAN modules. You can read about it here.

  All I have is a voice
  To undo the folded lie,
  The romantic lie in the brain
  Of the sensual man-in-the-street
  And the lie of Authority
  Whose buildings grope the sky:
  There is no such thing as the State
  And no one exists alone;
  Hunger allows no choice
  To the citizen or the police;
  We must love one another or die.

    -- W.H. Auden, September 1, 1939

The Perl 5 development team is gratified to announce the release of
Perl 5.16.0!

You will soon be able to download Perl 5.16.0 from your favorite CPAN
mirror or find it at:

https://metacpan.org/release/RJBS/perl-5.16.0/

SHA1 digests for this release are:

  56fb8097ff3e472f7a057848b37cb9ede7662b74  perl-5.16.0.tar.bz2
  d21de2b409d99440047a4e67a61f0a781ea2f66b  perl-5.16.0.tar.gz

You can find a full list of changes in the file "perldelta.pod" locate
+d in
the "pod" directory inside the release and on the web.

Perl 5.16.0 represents approximately 12 months of development since Pe
+rl
5.14.0 and contains approximately 590,000 lines of changes across 2,50
+0
files from 139 authors.

Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant
community of users and developers.  The following people are known to
have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.16.0:

Aaron Crane, Abhijit Menon-Sen, Abigail, Alan Haggai Alavi, Alberto
Simões, Alexandr Ciornii, Andreas König, Andy Dougherty, Aristotle
Pagaltzis, Bo Johansson, Bo Lindbergh, Breno G. de Oliveira, brian d
foy, Brian Fraser, Brian Greenfield, Carl Hayter, Chas. Owens,
Chia-liang Kao, Chip Salzenberg, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Christian
Hansen, Christopher J. Madsen, chromatic, Claes Jacobsson, Claudio
Ramirez, Craig A. Berry, Damian Conway, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Darin
McBride, Dave Rolsky, David Cantrell, David Golden, David Leadbeater,
David Mitchell, Dee Newcum, Dennis Kaarsemaker, Dominic Hargreaves,
Douglas Christopher Wilson, Eric Brine, Father Chrysostomos, Florian
Ragwitz, Frederic Briere, George Greer, Gerard Goossen, Gisle Aas,
H.Merijn Brand, Hojung Youn, Ian Goodacre, James E Keenan, Jan Dubois,
Jerry D. Hedden, Jesse Luehrs, Jesse Vincent, Jilles Tjoelker, Jim
Cromie, Jim Meyering, Joel Berger, Johan Vromans, Johannes Plunien, Jo
+hn
Hawkinson, John P. Linderman, John Peacock, Joshua ben Jore, Juerd
Waalboer, Karl Williamson, Karthik Rajagopalan, Keith Thompson, Kevin 
+J.
Woolley, Kevin Ryde, Laurent Dami, Leo Lapworth, Leon Brocard, Leon
Timmermans, Louis Strous, Lukas Mai, Marc Green, Marcel Grünauer, Mark
A.  Stratman, Mark Dootson, Mark Jason Dominus, Martin Hasch, Matthew
Horsfall, Max Maischein, Michael G Schwern, Michael Witten, Mike
Sheldrake, Moritz Lenz, Nicholas Clark, Niko Tyni, Nuno Carvalho, Pau
Amma, Paul Evans, Paul Green, Paul Johnson, Perlover, Peter John Ackla
+m,
Peter Martini, Peter Scott, Phil Monsen, Pino Toscano, Rafael
Garcia-Suarez, Rainer Tammer, Reini Urban, Ricardo Signes, Robin Barke
+r,
Rodolfo Carvalho, Salvador Fandiño, Sam Kimbrel, Samuel Thibault, Shaw
+n
M Moore, Shigeya Suzuki, Shirakata Kentaro, Shlomi Fish, Sisyphus,
Slaven Rezic, Spiros Denaxas, Steffen Müller, Steffen Schwigon, Stephe
+n
Bennett, Stephen Oberholtzer, Stevan Little, Steve Hay, Steve Peters,
Thomas Sibley, Thorsten Glaser, Timothe Litt, Todd Rinaldo, Tom
Christiansen, Tom Hukins, Tony Cook, Vadim Konovalov, Vincent Pit,
Vladimir Timofeev, Walt Mankowski, Yves Orton, Zefram, Zsbán Ambrus,
Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason.

The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically
generated from version control history.  In particular, it does not
include the names of the (very much appreciated) contributors who
reported issues to the Perl bug tracker.

Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN
modules included in Perl's core.  We're grateful to the entire CPAN
community for helping Perl to flourish.

For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors,
please see the AUTHORS file in the Perl source distribution.

We expect to release Perl 5.16.1 on or around June 20, 2012, addressin
+g
significant bugs found after this release.  The 5.17 development branc
+h
will open shortly, and a 5.17.0 release will follow within the month,
with regular monthly releases following on the 20th of each month.  Th
+e
next major stable release of Perl 5, version 5.18.0, should appear in
May 2013.

-- 
rjbs
[download]

Tad lost his battle with lung cancer last Sunday. I had known about his illness for about six months, and had spoken to him about a month ago. At that time, he had said things weren't going well, but he was still hopeful.

His obituary says the services are today. I'm in the wrong city for that, unfortunately. There's also a guest book there if you want to add a note.

Rest in piece, my friend. 55 years for you was far too young.

The new 1.40 release of Test::WWW::Mechanize adds functions to help scrape text from your HTML as you test it. This should make things much easier for your integration test of your web apps.

For example, if you want to make sure that this shows up:

<h1>My awesome page!</h1>
[download]

then you can add an id attribute to the <h1>

<h1 id="pagetitle">My awesome page!</h1>
[download]

and your test can check for it:

$mech->scraped_id_is( 'pagetitle', 'My Awesome Page!' );
[download]

Two other functions are added to help in your text extraction: ->scrape_text_by_id() and ->scrape_text_by_attr().

Will these functions help your testing? Do you have other methods that you use to aid testing? As always, I welcome your feedback.

On the behalf of the developers and contributors team, I'm pleased to announce that DBD::Firebird v1.00 , a DBI driver for the Firebird RDBMS server is released.

This release is not the first, but is an important milestone because it brings many changes. We hope to like what is changed and help us testing it on the new enabled platforms (OSX/cygwin/Windows with Visual Studio), but we can do that only with support from the Perl Community.

The development is on GitHub at: https://github.com/mariuz/perl-dbd-firebird And the mailing list is here

Thank you,

Hello all,
I made this for myself : a PDF printable version of the Moose::Manual. I will do it for the Moose::Cookbook too.

I thought others might want to use it. Help yourself :
PDF file
and if you want to change it, here is the original :
ODT file
All critics are more than welcome, and you can make changes yourselves now.

I think (it's just my very humble opinion) that ALL Perl documentation should be provided in such a printable format, so that people like me who are hurt by screens can easily print it all. It's also easier for me to learn when i can highlight things and take notes.

I didn't know where to share it, so i just put it here for now. If anybody has a better idea, please move it or tell me where to post / send it.

Some of you might have heard of KinoSearch, a Perl search engine with a fast C/XS core, inspired by Lucene.

The KinoSearch contributors have then expanded in focus, implementing more functionality in C and enabling bindings to other programming languages. Still the Perl bindings are the most complete and usables ones. The result is Lucy, an Apache incubator project.

Although the news hasn't made the front page of apache.org yet, Lucy has been approved as a full Apache project. This means that all license issues have been resolved, and that the developer pool is considered sufficiently large and thriving.

I'd like to congratulate the Lucy developers to this important mileston. Everybody who needs a search engine should take a closer look at Lucy, it is fast and very well useable. I look forward to updating one of my own projects from KinoSearch to Lucy.

    How many roads must a man walk down
    Before you call him a man?         
    Yes, 'n' how many seas must a white dove sail
    Before she sleeps in the sand?               
    Yes, 'n' how many times must the cannonballs fly
    Before they're forever banned?
    The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind
    The answer is blowin' in the wind            

    How many years can a mountain exist
    Before it's washed to the sea?
    Yes, 'n' how many years can some people exist
    Before they're allowed to be free?           
    Yes, 'n' how many times can a man turn his head
    Pretending he just doesn't see?
    The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind
    The answer is blowin' in the wind
                                     
    How many times must a man look up
    Before he can see the sky?       
    Yes, 'n' how many ears must one man have
    Before he can hear people cry?          
    Yes, 'n' how many deaths will it take till he knows
    That too many people have died?                    
    The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind
    The answer is blowin' in the wind            

            -- Bob Dylan, Spring 1962

We are delighted to announce Perl 5.15.9, the tenth development releas
+e
of Perl 5.15.

You will soon be able to download Perl 5.15.9 from your favorite CPAN
mirror or find it at:

https://metacpan.org/release/ABIGAIL/perl-5.15.9/

SHA1 digests for this release are:

 a66381386b6a276fddeda0cfb0631ff2d3d4e891   perl-5.15.9.tar.gz        
+          
 993545b43e723cb5e99acafa78b626af08cdbb72   perl-5.15.9.tar.bz2       
+          

You can find a full list of changes in the file "perldelta.pod" locate
+d in      
the "pod" directory inside the release and on the web.

Acknowledgements

Perl 5.15.9 represents approximately 4 weeks of development since Perl
+ 5.15.8
and contains approximately 79,000 lines of changes across 530 files fr
+om 23
authors.

Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant c
+ommunity
of users and developers. The following people are known to have contri
+buted the
improvements that became Perl 5.15.9:

Aaron Crane, Abigail, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry, Dave Ro
+lsky,
David Cantrell, David Golden, David Mitchell, Eric Brine, Father Chrys
+ostomos,
Florian Ragwitz, James E Keenan, Jesse Vincent, Karl Williamson, Marc 
+Green,
Max Maischein, Nicholas Clark, Pau Amma, Reini Urban, Ricardo Signes, 
+Tony
Cook, Yves Orton, Zefram.          

The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically g
+enerated
from version control history. In particular, it does not include the n
+ames of
the (very much appreciated) contributors who reported issues to the Pe
+rl bug
tracker.

Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN mo
+dules
included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN community f
+or
helping Perl to flourish.                              

For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors, ple
+ase see
the AUTHORS file in the Perl source distribution.

We expect this to be the last development release of Perl 5.15. The ne
+xt
major stable release of Perl 5, version 5.16.0, should appear in May 2
+012.


Your Humble Release Manager,


Abigail
[download]

On the fwp mailing list, BooK has proposed a new Perl secret operator.

There is a battle ensuing over its name: does ~~<> more closely resemble sperm or a kite?

References

• Original secret operator thread (fwp, Feb 2005)
• Baby Cart secret operator (fwp, Jul 2006)
• Original set of "!"-based secret operators (fwp, Nov 2007)
• Flaming X-wing secret operator (fwp, Nov 2007)
• Screwdriver secret operator (fwp, Jun 2009)
• Sperm secret operator (fwp, Mar 2012)

• BooK "perlsecret - Perl secret operators and constants" draft man page
• Secret Perl Operators (catonmat.net)
• "Secret" operators
• Secret Perl Operators: the boolean list squash operator, x!!
• Re: Hidden features of Perl
• meaning of =()=

Update: added new link to perlsecret draft man page.

Note: I did not find this on this site through a few searches do I guess that it has never been posted here.

Recently I have come across LMCTFY (Let me CPAN that for you).

Nothing special. But I thought it might be useful here (actually, it's especially useful on StackOverflow who has banned LMGTFY links). Have fun!

    "Doctor Who, hey Doctor Who
      Doctor Who, in the Tardis
      Doctor Who, hey Doctor Who
      Doctor Who, Doc, Doctor Who
      Doctor Who, Doc, Doctor Who"

   Gibberish of course, but every lad in the country under a certain
   age related instinctively to what it was about. The ones slightly
   older needed a couple of pints inside them to clear away the mind
   debris left by the passing years before it made sense. As for
   girls and our chorus, we think they must have seen it as pure crap.
   A fact that must have limited to zero our chances of staying at The
   Top for more than one week.

   Stock, Aitkin and Waterman, however, are kings of writing chorus
   lyrics that go straight to the emotional heart of the 7" single
   buying girls in this country. Their most successful records will kick
   into the chorus with a line which encapsulates the entire emotional
   meaning of the song. This will obviously be used as the title. As
   soon as Rick Astley hit the first line of the chorus on his debut
   single it was all over - the Number One position was guaranteed:

     "I'm never going to give you up"

     -- The KLF - The Manual-How To Have A Number One The Easy Way

We are very happy to announce Perl 5.15.8, the eighth
development release of Perl 5.15.

You will soon be able to download Perl 5.15.8 from your favorite CPAN
mirror or find it at:

https://metacpan.org/release/CORION/perl-5.15.8/

SHA1 digests for this release are:

5112c79a598896cfa7cadb6409b0a19ad080edd7  perl-5.15.8.tar.gz
8fd2f9b61fd0bd0fa2840c4ef2cc12169381f3b9  perl-5.15.8.tar.bz2

You can find a full list of changes in the file "perldelta.pod" located
in the "pod" directory inside the release and on the web.

Acknowledgements

Perl 5.15.8 represents approximately 4 weeks of development since Perl
5.15.7 and contains approximately 61,000 lines of changes across 480
files from 36 authors.

Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant
community of users and developers. The following people are known to
have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.15.8:

Abhijit Menon-Sen, Alan Haggai Alavi, Alexandr Ciornii, Andy Dougherty, 
Brian Fraser, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry, Darin McBride, 
Dave Rolsky, David Golden, David Leadbeater, David Mitchell, Dominic 
Hargreaves, Eric Brine, Father Chrysostomos, Florian Ragwitz, H.Merijn 
Brand, Juerd Waalboer, Karl Williamson, Leon Timmermans, Marc Green, Max 
Maischein, Nicholas Clark, Paul Evans, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Rainer 
Tammer, Reini Urban, Ricardo Signes, Robin Barker, Shlomi Fish, Steffen 
Müller, Todd Rinaldo, Tony Cook, Yves Orton, Zefram, Ævar Arnfjörð 
Bjarmason.

The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically 
generated from version control history. In particular, it does not
include the names of the (very much appreciated) contributors who
reported issues to the Perl bug tracker.

Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN 
modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN
community for helping Perl to flourish.

For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors, 
please see the F<AUTHORS> file in the Perl source distribution.

We expect to release Perl 5.15.9 on the 20th March 2012.  The next major 
stable release of Perl 5, version 5.16.0, should appear in May 2012.

Thanks,
-max (Corion on CPAN)