The International Components for Unicode (or ICU for short) is an open source library that provides developers with comprehensive support for Unicode and globalization. It includes a regular expression engine with particularly strong support for matching Unicode properties. RegexBuddy fully supports all these Unicode properties and the exact characters they match in ICU 55 (Unicode 7.0.0) through ICU 77 (Unicode 16.0.0).
ICU is used in many applications, development tools, and software platforms, including LibreOffice, R, and MySQL. RegexBuddy supports ICU both directly as a C or C++ library and as part of these other applications and languages.
First, use RegexBuddy to define a regex or retrieve a regexp saved in a RegexBuddy library. Rely on RegexBuddy’s clear regex analysis, which is constantly updated as you build the pattern, rather than dealing with the cryptic regex syntax on your own. Detailed help on that syntax is always only a click away.
If you copied a regex written for another programming language, simply paste it into RegexBuddy, select the original language, and then convert the regex to the specific version of ICU you’re working with. If you’re writing a code library that needs to work with multiple versions of ICU, compare your regex between those ICU versions to make sure it will work as intended with all of them.
If you created a new regular expression, test and debug it in RegexBuddy before using it in your actual application. Test each regex in RegexBuddy’s safe sandbox without risking precious data. Quickly apply the regex to a wide variety of input and sample data, without having to produce that input through your application.
Finally, let RegexBuddy generate a source code snippet that you can copy and paste directly into the C or C++ code editor you use. Just choose what you want to use the regex for, and a fully functional code snippet is ready. You can change the names of variables and parameters to suit your naming style or the current situation, which RegexBuddy automatically remembers.
Don’t bother trying to remember which C++ classes to use or which C functions to call. And don’t worry about properly escaping backslashes and quotes. Just tell RegexBuddy what you want to do, and you will get the proper C or C++ code straight away. Anything can be done: testing a string for a match, extracting search matches, validating input, search-and-replace, splitting a string, etc.