{"id":49441,"date":"2025-09-30T16:18:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-30T20:18:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=49441"},"modified":"2025-09-30T17:12:57","modified_gmt":"2025-09-30T21:12:57","slug":"explaining-regex-locally-with-xcode","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/30\/explaining-regex-locally-with-xcode\/","title":{"rendered":"Explaining Regex Locally With Xcode"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Samuels<\/a>:<\/p>\n

My approach when needing to figure out what an old regex was doing was to paste it into whatever the top search result for “Explain regular expression” was.<\/p>

Something that I’ve been doing for a while but hadn’t really thought about was using Xcode’s Refactor<\/code> > Convert to Regex Builder<\/code> as a way to explain a regular expression without having data leave my machine.\nYes, it’s a shocker but one of Xcode’s refactoring tools actually works for me.\nIt works surprisingly well and as a bonus gets those endorphins flowing knowing that my data is safe from some AI drivel.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

Depending on your level of experience with regex you might think this is actually more wordy\/overkill (in this case I’d agree) but the point is each part of the regex is broken out into smaller parts that have names explaining what they are doing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

And you can manipulate it using Code Folding.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n