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The regex thing is amazing: http://www.rise4fun.com/Rex/

It sort-of does something I've wanted: given a regex R generating a language L, produce a few strings from L in a helpful way.

Of course, L is usually infinite, so it's easy to generate strings in an unhelpful way.

For instance, the phone number one:

http://www.rise4fun.com/Rex/phone

and the URL one:

http://www.rise4fun.com/Rex/weburl

You can modify the given regex, click "ask rex", and wait a while, and it will return two patterns from the regex. Just two...

There was a discussion of that on HN a few years ago, but the site that was linked seems broken now: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1725447

Thanks for that, which was new to me. It seemed to do what I had in mind.

I raised this a few months ago, but commenters thought I wanted to solve a different problem, such as a tool to check a regex against a group of strings that I would supply myself:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3297788

Totally agree.

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