How To Get The Latest Version of RegexBuddy

If you purchased RegexBuddy on or after 16 September 2012, your license is already valid for the latest version of RegexBuddy and you can download it immediately.

If you purchased RegexBuddy prior to 16 September 2012, you own RegexBuddy version 3 or earlier. If you download RegexBuddy again, you will receive the latest free minor update for you. Since you already own a previous version, you can buy version 4 at the discounted price of US$ 19.95 instead of the full price of US$ 39.95 which new customers pay.

If you are not sure which version you own, simply type in your user id and email address below. If you own version 4, 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 4 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 4 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.

Email address:
RegexBuddy user ID:
Number of users to upgrade: (omit to keep the same number of users)

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 4 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.

RegexBuddy Upgrade to Version 4Package PriceUnit Price
RegexBuddy single user upgrade to version 4US$ 19.95US$ 19.95
RegexBuddy 5-user upgrade to version 4US$ 79.95US$ 15.99
RegexBuddy 10-user upgrade to version 4US$ 139.00US$ 13.90
RegexBuddy 20-user upgrade to version 4US$ 239.00US$ 11.95
RegexBuddy 30-user upgrade to version 4US$ 329.00US$ 10.96
RegexBuddy 50-user upgrade to version 4US$ 499.00US$ 9.98
RegexBuddy 75-user upgrade to version 4US$ 669.00US$ 8.92
RegexBuddy 100-user upgrade to version 4US$ 799.00US$ 7.99

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.

“RegexBuddy is to regex what the pocket calculator was to arithmetic. And the painstaking improvements in ‘flavors’ is admirable.”
— Joshua Coppersmith
  18 September 2013, Kansas, USA
“As a coder I know that a software is never ‘finished’. But I always thought that regexbuddy 3 is as closed as possible to this state. When I got your mail about version 4 I was surprised. You really managed to add THIS lot of valuable things under the hood; leaving the interface intact - I am really impressed. Coding is one thing, concurrently knowing about UX a complete other.”
— Daniel Marohn
  18 September 2013, Germany

Why Upgrade

When you start RegexBuddy 4 for the first time, it may seem that not much has changed since RegexBuddy 3. The user interface is indeed largely unchanged. You’ll feel right at home.

But if you look closer, you’ll see evidence of the tremendous improvements that have been made under the hood in RegexBuddy 4. On the toolbar at the top, the drop-down lists with the regex flavor and replacement flavor have been replaced with a single list of applications. These applications are a combination of regex flavor, replacement flavor, split flavor, string style, and source code template. Select “More applications and languages” at the top of the list to choose any of the 292 predefined applications. The number is so large because RegexBuddy now supports many different versions of the same applications. Where RegexBuddy 3 had only “Java”, RegexBuddy 4 knows the differences between Java 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. Some applications use the same flavors. VBscript developers, for example, can now select VBscript as their application. With RegexBuddy 3 they had to remember that VBscript uses the JavaScript regex flavor. RegexBuddy 4 supports the latest versions of all the regex flavors that RegexBuddy 3 supported, including Delphi XE6, Java 8, .NET 4.5, PCRE 8.35, Perl 5.18, PHP 5.5.11, Python 3.4, R 3.1.0, Ruby 2.1, and Tcl 5.6. It also supports multiple variations of similar regex flavors, such as the JavaScript implementations in different browsers.

RegexBuddy’s emulation of all the regex and replacement flavors it supports is now far more accurate. RegexBuddy 3 knew which flavors support the caret and anchor to match at the start and end of a line, for example. But RegexBuddy 4 also knows exactly which characters each flavor treats as line breaks. RegexBuddy’s Test panel gives you exactly the same matches (or lack thereof) as your actual application will. The Create panel explains such details if you select the “Detailed” option. In total, RegexBuddy 4 is aware of 873 different aspects (syntactic and behavioral differences) of 295 regular expression flavors, and 186 aspects of 67 replacement text flavors. If you thought most modern regex flavors were all pretty much the same: think again!

In RegexBuddy 3, testing a Split operation always split the subject string along the regex matches in the same way. RegexBuddy 4 introduces split flavors, which describe exactly how the split function in a particular programming language works, along with the options that it accepts. RegexBuddy’s Test panel now splits strings in exactly the same way your actual application will. RegexBuddy 4 is aware of 43 aspects of 21 split flavors.

RegexBuddy’s increased accuracy can sometimes get in the way of helping you create regular expressions, particularly if you’re working with a regex flavor that is different than the one you normally use. To alleviate this, you can now toggle RegexBuddy between Helpful and Strict mode. For example, you may be used to using \A to match the start of the string. But in JavaScript, \A matches a literal A. In Helpful mode, RegexBuddy assumes that if you wanted to match A literally, you’d just enter A as your regex. So if you enter \A, RegexBuddy takes the liberty of telling you that JavaScript does not support \A as a start-of-string anchor. If you double-click the error on the Create panel, RegexBuddy will replace \A with ^ which JavaScript does support. In Strict mode, however, RegexBuddy will tell you that \A matches a literal A in JavaScript, and behave that way on the Test panel.

The matching modes such as “dot matches line breaks” are now implemented as drop-down lists rather than as push buttons. This makes it easier to see which mode you’re using. RegexBuddy now supports many more matching modes that are specific to certain regex flavors, such as explicit capture, line break handling, ungreedy matching, etc. To reduce clutter, RegexBuddy 4 only shows options that the active flavor actually allows you to change. On the Operation tab in the Preferences you can choose to always have all options visible like they were in RegexBuddy 3.

The Create panel can now compare multiple applications. If you’re creating regexes to be used in a library that targets several versions of a programming language, you can select all those flavors. RegexBuddy will tell you if any of the selected versions may interpret the regex differently. This way you can work around those differences while writing your code, so they don’t turn up as unpleasant surprises when testing your code.

The brand new Convert panel allows you to convert regular expressions and replacement texts from one application to another. If the two application’s regex flavors use different syntax for the same thing, the Convert panel will modify your regex to use the target flavor’s syntax. If the two applications support the same feature (using the same or different syntax) but with a difference in behavior that can lead to different matches, then the Convert panel will warn you about such differences. If you ever copy and paste a regex from the Internet, you should use the Convert panel to make sure there aren’t any (subtle) differences that may cause it to fail in your application.

The Test panel now highlights line breaks when they are part of the regex match. They now indicate the line break style instead of showing a generic paragraph symbol. The Line Breaks submenu in the Test panel’s right-click menu now has an additional option for automatic line breaks. This option, which is on by default, tells RegexBuddy to automatically adjust the test subject’s line breaks to those used by the active application. This way, the dot and the start-of-line and end-of-line anchors will always work the way you expect them to. It also mimics the default behavior of most scripting languages do. They read files in text mode, which automatically handles any differences in the line break style used by the text file and the line break style that the language uses internally.

If your regular expression contains a repeated capturing group and you’re using the .NET regex flavor, then the match details that RegexBuddy shows when you double-click a highlighted match on the Test panel now show all the iterations of that capturing group. These are the same strings that you can retrieve via .NET’s CaptureCollection class.

The Language selection was removed from the Use tab. Selecting an application now automatically selects the right source code template for the Use panel. You can still create custom source code templates or use the ones you created for RegexBuddy 3. To put them to use, select “More applications and languages” in the applications list and then create your own application, selecting the flavors it uses and the source code template. The template editor now highlights placeholders which keeps things readable in languages that treat % as an operator. The functions that generate a comment or string with the regex tree are no longer hard-coded. They are now implemented as functions that you can customize in the template editor.

RegexBuddy’s built-in GREP excludes files and folders that are hidden or that look like backup copies by default. In RegexBuddy 4, you can now configure or disable this on the GREP tab in the Preferences.

RegexBuddy 4 makes rich text available on the clipboard whenever you copy some text. This means that syntax coloring is preserved when you paste into a word processor or rich text editor. Your regular expressions, test data with highlighted matches, and code snippets will appear in your word processor as they do in RegexBuddy.

RegexBuddy 4 is a full Unicode application. You can use any mixture of any number of scripts anywhere in RegexBuddy, including in file names. RegexBuddy now supports bidirectional editing, so you can edit text written in right-to-left scripts such as Arabic or Hebrew or text written in a mixture of left-to-right and right-to-left scripts. You can configure text direction, cursor movement, fonts, and character spacing as part of the new text layout configuration system on the Editors tab in the Preferences.

RegexBuddy 4’s interface scales properly and looks crisp when using the high DPI settings in Windows Vista and later. This makes RegexBuddy look perfect on the latest ultra high resolution laptops and monitors.

RegexBuddy 4 requires Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, or 11 to run. The 32-bit and 64-bit editions of these Windows versions are fully supported. Older versions of Windows are no longer supported.

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