A Cure for the Regex Headache 

 Whenever I do a little data cleaning with a scripting language, I
always find myself struggling with regular expressions. Now a new
site,  txt2re , allows you to figure out the regular expression
you want from some sample text: 

 
   This system acts as a regular expression generator. Instead of trying to build the regular expression, you start off with the string that you want to search. You paste this into the site, click submit and the site finds recognisable patterns in your string. You then select the patterns that you are interested in and it writes a fully fledged program that extracts those patterns from that string. You then copy the program into your editor or IDE and play with it to integrate it into your program. 
 

 (via  kottke )