I know that there exist in Perl, TCL and Lisp programs for testing regular expressions. These testers, you give the tester a string, type in some regex. As the regex is entered it will show the string, highlighting the part that matches. It is used for programmers in those language to design their regex. Of course one can take a regex made in one tester and use it in any language. But my experience is that in almost any language, if you construct a regex, it's better to do it using the same regex machine that will be used when the program is run. Each engine has it's own little idiosyncrancies. So it's better to use the same machine to test a regex that it will be used with. Is there some program that allowqs one to do this?