The Regex Coach

The Regex Coach is ranked #5 of 23 in regular expression testers on The Geeks Club. It runs on Linux, Windows. There is a free plan.

The Regex Coach plans and pricing

All plans

The Regex Coach Free Free for private and non-commercial use · Commercial use is free, but redistribution or charging money requires written permission weitz.de · 2 Oct 2026

Compared on regular expression testers

Free plan: Yes
Regex flavors: Perl-compatible
Pattern explanation: Yes
Step-through debugger: Yes
Code generation: No
Saved patterns: Yes

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The Regex Coach

What it does: The Regex Coach is a graphical application for interactively experimenting with Perl-compatible regular expressions.
Live matching: It shows whether a regex matches a target string and updates other parts of the application in real time when you make changes.
Match inspection: It can highlight captured groups or selected parts of a regular expression in the target string.
Regex explanation: It tries to describe a regular expression in plain English and can display a graphical representation of its parse tree.
Matching stepper: It can single-step through the matching process performed by its regex engine.
Text operations: It simulates Perl's split and substitution operators.
Intended users: The maker says it may be useful to programmers using Perl-compatible regex toolkits such as PCRE or CL-PPCRE.
Engine and implementation: The application is written in Common Lisp and uses CL-PPCRE as its regex engine.
Windows availability: The current download is version 0.9.2, and the maker says the program has not changed since 2008; the page reports it worked for the maker on Windows 10 in June 2023.
Linux availability: Linux is no longer maintained, but the maker provides the unsupported 0.8.5 release, which also runs on FreeBSD.
Mac availability: The maker says there is no Mac version and no plan to release one.
Support and warranty: The program is provided as-is with no warranty, and the maker says not to expect support for older Windows configurations or the unsupported Linux release.
Known limitations: The regex engine may encounter a stack overflow on relatively long regular expressions, and the maker notes possible issues on Eastern European Windows versions using character set 1250 or similar.
Privacy and security: The maker's website privacy notice says its server logs may include IP addresses and other access data, and that anonymous log data is stored separately from personal data supplied by users.
Price from: Free

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Where it ranks on The Geeks Club

Best Regular Expression Testers in 2026#5 of 23

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Sources

weitz.de/regex-coach/· checked 2 Oct 2026
weitz.de/imprint.html· checked 2 Oct 2026