How To Get The Latest Version of RegexBuddy™

If you purchased RegexBuddy on or after 29 September 2024 then your license is already valid for the latest version of RegexBuddy and you can download it immediately.

If you purchased RegexBuddy prior to 29 September 2024 then you own RegexBuddy version 4 or earlier. If you download RegexBuddy again then you will receive the latest free minor update for you. Since you already own a previous version, you can buy version 5 at the discounted price of US$ 29.95 instead of the full price of US$ 59.95 which new customers pay.

If you are not sure which version you own then simply type in your user id and email address below. If you own version 5 then you will be told you can download the latest version free of charge. If not, you will be presented with the form to purchase the upgrade.

You can upgrade to RegexBuddy 5 via our secure online checkout. We accept all major credit cards, debit cards, and prepaid cards. You can also pay by bank transfer. When paying with a card or another instantaneous payment method you will be able to download RegexBuddy 5 immediately after completing checkout.

Please enter the email address associated with your current RegexBuddy license, and your RegexBuddy user ID. If you lost your user ID, you can have it resent instantly by entering your email address on the download page. If you have your user ID, it doesn’t matter if the email address no longer works. You can enter new contact details on the order form.

The exact pricing depends on the number of users you want the upgraded license to be valid for. If you leave the “number of users to upgrade” box blank, then your RegexBuddy 5 license will be valid for the same number of users as your previous RegexBuddy license. If you want to increase or decrease the number of users, enter the total number of users that the upgraded license should be valid for. If the number of users you want to upgrade is the same or less than you had on the original license, then the price is calculated using the following table with the volume discount for the number of users you are upgrading. If the number of users you want on the upgraded license is greater than you had on the original license, then the price is the sum of the upgrade cost for the users on the original license with the volume discount for the number of users on the original license, plus the new user price for the additional users with the volume discount for the total number of users on the upgraded license. For larger quantities than listed below, please contact us.

Prices shown on our website exclude taxes. Sales tax, VAT, or GST will be added during checkout if your country imposes such taxes on internet sales. You will have the opportunity to provide a tax ID or VAT number to remove the tax if your business is tax exempt.

Why Upgrade

When you start RegexBuddy 5 you’ll feel right at home. The user interface is basically the same as in previous versions. The most obvious changes are cosmetic. The new toolbar icons give RegexBuddy 5 the same fresh look as PowerGREP 5 and EditPad 8. But their main benefit is that they come in 10 different sizes that cover all the scaling increments from 100% to 400% available in the basic display settings in Windows. RegexBuddy can now correctly scale its toolbars on all PC and laptop displays, including small laptops with 4K screens. In the View menu you can now select a dark theme and a black theme. The black theme is the same theme that EditPad 8 uses as its dark theme. It uses pure black for window backgrounds. Its style fits well with Windows 10. The dark theme in RegexBuddy is a new theme that is less contrasty with dark gray backgrounds. Its style fits better with Windows 11. You can select either theme on any version of Windows. Or select the light theme to get the same look as RegexBuddy 4 (but with new toolbar icons).

Speaking of Windows versions, Windows XP and Windows Vista are no longer supported. The installer will check if you have Windows 7 or later and refuse installation if you don’t. If you upgrade to RegexBuddy 5 you will still be able to download RegexBuddy 4 in case you ever need it for a job on a legacy system that still runs Windows XP.

The most significant change in functionality is the significantly expanded list of supported applications. To see the full list of 530 applications (up from 292), select “more applications and languages” in the drop-down list in the top left corner. Maximize the dialog box to get a better overview. The list now gains columns if you make the dialog box wider. Tick your favorite applications to put them directly in the drop-down list. Different versions of the same application are listed and counted separately if there is any difference between their regex support.

Major new regex engines are RE2 and ICU. RE2 is developed by Google and used by Google Sheets and Google BigQuery which RegexBuddy 5 has built-in support for. Select RE2 directly to create regexes for any other application using RE2 or to generate code snippets to use the RE2 C++ classes directly. All versions going back to RE2 2017-05-01 are supported.

ICU stands for International Components for Unicode. It is used in many applications and frameworks to provide comprehensive support for Unicode and also regular expressions. RegexBuddy now supports ICU 55 and later. You can select “ICU C” or “ICU C++” to generate C or C++ code snippets to use the ICU library directly. Select either of these to generate regexes for any other application that is built using ICU. RegexBuddy has built-in support for LibreOffice, MySQL 8, and the R stringi package. For LibreOffice, select your LibreOffice version and RegexBuddy emulate the correct version of ICU. For MySQL and stringi, select “MySQL ICU” or “R stringi” with the ICU version that your MySQL or R installation was built against. Both “MySQL ICU” or “R stringi” provide a function labeled “check regex library version” on the Use panel to generate a code snippet to check which ICU version that should be.

Other newly supported programming languages with support for generating code snippets are F#, Python.NET and IronPython which are all based on the .NET regex flavor. TypeScript is based on JavaScript. wxWidgets uses Tcl’s ARE engine or PCRE2. Other newly supported applications are Google Sheets (JavaScript) and Notepad++ (Boost).

All previously supported applications and languages are now up-to-date with the latest releases. This includes C++Builder 12 Modern which is based on the libc++ instead of the Dinkumware implementation of std::regex. Oracle 18c and 21c are now supported, as are the latest Perl 5.40, PHP 8.3, and R 4.4.1. XML Schema and XPath are now based on the actual implementation in Saxon 10 to 12 rather than following our reading of the W3C recommendations. Saxon has its own ideas about a few things. XPath 2 and XPath 3 are now separate flavors. For JavaScript RegexBuddy 4 emulated only the latest version due to automatic browser updates. Now we’ve added support for Firefox 52 (the last version to support Windows XP or Vista) and Firefox 12 (the last to support Windows 2000 and similar to the original Firefox flavor in RegexBuddy 4.0.0) to provide a sampling of legacy JavaScript implementations. This can be helpful in porting old JavaScript applications to modern browsers. RegexBuddy is still capable of comparing and converting between all the regex flavors that it supports even though the number of combinations keeps increasing dramatically.

To keep things manageable, RegexBuddy 5 does drop support for some older versions. The reason is not so much that these flavors are all about two decades old now, but that we simply ran into too many issues (bugs and odd behavior) with these old flavors that they were getting in the way of properly supporting new flavors and more accurately emulating all flavors. Removed versions include Perl 5.8 to 5.12, PCRE 4.0 to 4.4, the PHP 4.x.x preg functions based on PCRE 4.x, Visual C++ 2008, and Oracle 10g. XRegExp support has been reduced to the latest version for modern browsers and the last version to support MSIE. If you load a library created with RegexBuddy 4.x.x that contains regexes using some of these removed versions then RegexBuddy 5 automatically changes those regexes to the oldest version of the same flavor that it still supports. This will cause those regexes to be interpreted (slightly) differently.

There are also two important changes to the ability to define custom applications in the “more applications and languages” dialog. The radio buttons to indicate support for making replacements and splitting strings were removed. Only the drop-down lists remain. You can select “application cannot search-and-replace” and “application cannot split strings” at the top of the drop-down list. Or you can select a search-and-replace flavor or split flavor that RegexBuddy knows to be compatible with your chosen regex flavor. The ability to select any replacement flavor or split flavor (compatible or not) was removed. This dramatically reduces the number of combinations we need to test and avoids problems with combinations that really don’t work together.

The other change is a new drop-down list labeled “external options flavor”. Most regex engines have options such as /s in Perl or RegexOptions.SingleLine in .NET that are set outside the regular expression. RegexBuddy 4 already knew which options are actually available in each application. It defined that as part of the regular expression flavor. RegexBuddy 5 now puts that information in a new type of “flavor” dedicated to just those external options. This makes it much easier to add proper support applications that are based on an existing regex flavor but don’t expose all of its options. This allowed us to easily add Notepad++ and LibreOffice, for example, using the Boost and ICU regex flavors. We only had to add two new “external” flavors specific to Notepad++ and LibreOffice. It also simplified some implementations. JavaScript and HTML5 are now based on the same JavaScript regex flavor, but with separate “external” flavors to indicate that HTML5 patterns don’t have external options and can’t find partial matches. Similarly, Delphi (TRegEx) and Delphi (TPerlRegEx) are now based on the same Delphi regex flavor as they only differ in which options you can set outside the regex.

RegexBuddy’s emulation of the syntactic and particularly the behavioral differences of all the regex flavors that it supports is now even more detailed and accurate than before. This is all based on very extensive testing of the actual regex libraries. Our test suite has ballooned from some 15,000 regexes for RegexBuddy 4.14 to over 98,000 regexes for RegexBuddy 5.0. In total, RegexBuddy 5 is aware of 1369 different aspects (syntactic and behavioral differences, up from 873) of 418 regular expression flavors (up from 295), and 221 aspects (up from 186) of 85 replacement text flavors (up from 67). If you thought most modern regex flavors were all pretty much the same: think again!

You can find the most important improvements listed as “aspects” in the version history. The majority of them are related to Unicode. RegexBuddy now fully supports all versions of Unicode from Unicode 3.0.0 until the latest 16.0.0, all of which are used by at least one application that RegexBuddy supports. RegexBuddy even knows that some regex flavors have inconsistent Unicode support. For example, .NET 4.8 was mostly based on Unicode 8.0.0, but its case folding tables were still based on Unicode 5.1.0. The list of Unicode blocks in .NET seems forever stuck at Unicode 4.0.1. Because of all these Unicode-related issues, if different versions an application are based on a different version of Unicode then RegexBuddy now treats those as separate regular expression flavors, even if there are no changes to the regex syntax. For example, RegexBuddy 4.14 has a single flavor for “Python 3.11–3.13”. But RegexBuddy 5 lists Python 3.11, 3.12, and 3.13 separately because it knows that these are based on Unicode 14.0.0, 15.0.0, and 15.1.0, respectively. New versions of Unicode do not just add more characters. Then can and often do change certain properties of existing characters as well. If you have a library saved with RegexBuddy 4 and load it into RegexBuddy 5 then regexes that used a flavor that has been separated into multiple flavors will be changed to use the oldest version. So a regex saved for “Python 3.11–3.13” in RegexBuddy 4 will be loaded using the “Python 3.11” flavor in RegexBuddy 5.

RegexBuddy itself now fully supports Unicode characters beyond U+FFFF. These are the Unicode characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plate. RegexBuddy now accurately emulates how each regex flavor deals with such characters. Some major regex engines, such as Boost and .NET, or JavaScript without /u, treat such characters as surrogate pairs. To allow you to properly test this, the Test panel now supports UCS-2 and UTF-16 as separate encodings. Switching between the two does not change the contents of your file. The UCS-2 encoding allows the Test panel to show if your regex matches half a surrogate pair, while the UTF-16 encoding allows supplemental plane characters to be matched properly as individual characters. The Operation page in the Preferences has new options to automatically change the encoding of the test subject to correspond with how your application works, be that 8-bit, surrogate pairs, or full Unicode. In hexadecimal mode, the Test panel now supports UCS-2 and UCS-4, allowing you to easily inspect 2-byte or 4-byte Unicode code points and see their corresponding characters.

The Create panel has gained a new level called “Precise” in addition to “Detailed” and “Brief”. This level explains everything RegexBuddy knows about each regex token. For anything related to Unicode that includes the Unicode version. Previously the “detailed” level did that. Now, the detailed level omits information that doesn’t really teach you how the regex works, such as the specific Unicode version. The “brief” level still keeps things simple, as before. For the regex \d, for example, the brief explanation may be (depending on the flavor) that this matches a digit. The detailed explanation would add whether that is an ASCII digit or a Unicode digit, which is an important distinction. The precise explanation adds the Unicode version, which doesn’t really matter if your application only needs to work with modern languages spoken by millions of people, which were all covered by Unicode 3.0.0 (the oldest version used by any flavor supported by RegexBuddy).

The Create panel can add extra nodes with tips to certain regular expressions. If your regex has a named capturing group, for example, then it can add a tip to unnamed capturing groups that mixing named and numbered groups is not recommended. RegexBuddy 4 added no tips to a brief tree, some tips to a detailed tree in strict mode, and all tips to a detailed tree in helpful mode. RegexBuddy 5 has a separate setting for the tips that you can set to “No tips”, “Key tips”, or “All tips” independent of the tree’s level of detail and the emulation mode. Key tips are tips that point to things that are more likely to be a problem or unintended. The tip about mixing named and numbered groups only appears if you select “All tips”.

Exporting the regex tree to HTML has been significantly improved and you can export the replacement tree as well. Syntax coloring is now preserved. The CSS needed for syntax coloring and the JavaScript needed for highlighting corresponding tokens and explanations can now be put into separate CSS and JS files. You can now export the regex or replacement tree as a PNG image or copy it to the clipboard as a bitmap. This includes the regex tree icons.

On the Convert panel you can now select an encoding or Unicode version to indicate which characters your regex will actually work with. This can reduce the number of warnings you get. For example, if you convert \d between two flavors that support it to match Unicode digits but one flavor uses a newer Unicode version that defines additional digits, then the Convert panel warns about that. You can suppress the warning by selecting an encoding or an older Unicode version that does not include those newer digits. It can also change the result of the conversion. If you set the encoding to “US ASCII”, for example, then \d is always converted into \d if both flavors support it to match a digit. RegexBuddy assumes that any Unicode-issues were ignored when the original regex was created and does the same for its conversion. But if you select one of the Unicode options, and the original flavor matches only ASCII digits with \d and the target flavor matches Unicode digits with \d then RegexBuddy converts the regex into [0-9] instead to preserve the fact that the original regex only matched ASCII digits.

The Convert panel has a new Test button which compares the results of the original regex using the original regex flavor and the converted regex using the conversion flavor on the Test panel. If they find the same matches in your sample text then you get a message saying so. If they find different matches then the differences are highlighted in the test subject.

The Test panel can now highlight zero-length matches by highlighting the space between two characters. Capturing groups inside lookaround that extends beyond the overall regex matches are now highlighted as long as they don’t overlap with the preceding or following match. There is a new option to highlight the first match only for those who want to emulate not setting the “global” flag in their regex engine. When the test subject and test result have the same number of lines, such as after a search-and-replace, scrolling one of them automatically scrolls the other to the same line, making it much easier to compare them.

The test results are shown in an editor control. This makes the results easy to work with, but can cause issues when the results include tabs or line breaks as those are also used to arrange the results in columns. RegexBuddy now substitutes tabs or line breaks representing tabs and line breaks when adding matches or replacements to test results that use tabs and line breaks to arrange the results. Test results listing multiple matches but not in columns now let you specify a custom delimiter. Choose something that does not occur in your matches to properly separate them.

Debugging a regular expression is now a lot more interesting when you have the Debug and Test panels arranged side by side. While the Debug panel has keyboard focus the Test panel shows the same highlighting as the line in the debugger that the cursor is on. Moving the cursor down on the Debug panel lets you see how the match attempt advances on the Test panel.

The GREP panel now has a Fold All button that folds all file headers, hiding all the matches. Unfold All does the opposite. Turning on “invert results” no longer automatically turns on “line-based”. Turning on only “invert results” produces a list of files in which your regex cannot find any matches.

Finally, to return to cosmetic features, many more predefined color palettes and many more palette customization options are now available. There are “Solarized” and “Harmonized” palettes with reduced contrast and monochrome palettes for which the color picker only shows a limited set of colors. For these palettes, the picker shows all the colors used in the selected palette in the order that they are first used so you can easily use exactly the same color for multiple elements. There are also new palettes optimized for the most common types of color blindness.

The regex palettes have additional named colors which make it possible to separately configure the appearance of alternation, anchors, quantifiers, character escapes, lookaround, and capturing groups. Groups no longer need to use all five nesting levels. The default palette has been updated to use several of these new features for more distinct highlighting and is overall a little less saturated. The new Visual Studio palettes rely on the new named colors to mimic how Visual Studio’s code editor highlights regular expressions. New RegexBuddy 4 and RegexBuddy 3 palettes enable RegexBuddy 5 to highlight regexes in the same way previous versions of RegexBuddy did.

You now have more options to customize individual colors. Many different underlining styles are now available, including a wavy underline. Underline can now use a different color than the font. You can now add a strikeout, which can have the same or a different color as the font. Bold and italic now offer an “unchanged” choice that uses the style selected in the text layout configuration; this allows the “off” choice to force bold or italic to be off. The new Copy and Paste buttons make it easy to apply the same settings to the another named color. Selecting “default” as the background, text, or underline color for selected text now leaves that color unchanged when text is selected instead of using the highlighting colors of the Windows theme. This allows syntax coloring to remain visible when text is selected.

Upgrade your copy of RegexBuddy now and juggle with regular expressions more easily and proficiently than before.