Copy Editor: A RegEx Puzzle

I use regular expressions occasionally, but not so often that I consider myself an expert. This game is ideal for people familiar with regex and looking for a little practice. I do not recommend this game to anyone interested in learning regular expressions from scratch, because the game does a terrible job of explaining basic concepts. Also, the game unnecessarily restricts the use of alternate solutions to puzzles. Ultimately, I do not recommend this game because it incorrectly claims to "teach" regex.

Good concept, but missing the point - for now. In it's current shape, I can't recommend this game. However I believe that some tweaks with the levels would make it really cool. I will gladly change my recommendation to positive in the future, if the main issues are solved. The biggest problem I see right now is : It is too hard for Regex beginners, and too easy/uninteresting for people knowing them. (For context : I do know RegEx very well, and played the game on twitch with beginners to try and explain what they are. It was not easy) I think Copy Editor can be a very effective way for beginners to discover RegEx. For advanced users, not so much. So here are my suggestion to improve on this and make it beginner-friendly : - The very first level should be a simple search/replace form, without the complexity of the "\s" which was confusing for beginners. Also, I don't understand why we cannot use the space in the search form. Yes, "\s" is more powerful, but forcing it in the very first level feels like a big obstacle to me. In fact, I believe the game is missing at least 5 very easy levels at the beginning. - I used the [] syntax very early in the game, same for (), $1, *, + etc. These are introduced very lately in the game though. Sometimes I couldn't even think of a solution without using concepts that weren't introduced yet. This is a big problem IMO. It confuses the advanced user and frustrates the beginner. - Although I like the stars feature, I would not activate it until level 10-15 (and make it available for previous levels but only after this moment). The first levels are not solvable with more than a stars with so few concepts introduced so far. For a beginner, this might be frustrating. Some other remarks : - A monospace font would be much better for some levels (like the ASCII heart one). The spaces are hard to count. Marking them in the same fashion as in the forms would be great. - When I ALT-Tab and go back to the game, the layout of the forms change making them unusable until you try to move them. A bit annoying. (Note: I'm on Linux) - The chat is great but I would highlight it somehow to make sure people are reading. Especially with the "clear theme" level which felt like a bug. - A way to show the parts that have been changed would be VERY helpful for better debugging. I had to trick the forms so many times, it was very annyoing. - Please ! add a title screen. This feels very unfinished without it !

I really, really wanted to like this but it just misses the mark in too many ways. I've used Regex for decades so I wasn't impressed to discover useful functions gated behind a "do it the hard way first" system Who then decided to not sync the scrolling - WHY WOULD YOU NOT DO THAT!? Who decided to use a non-fixed-space font and/or not offer some highlighted for whitespace?????! The puzzles go south really quickly too - I think it's the 4th puzzle in (the Heart) which starts the rot - it's impossible to see spaces, \s behaves erratically (removing carriage returns 'sometimes??' In the end the solution is a mix of "counting characters" and guessing - zero sense of satisfaction in that - and the puzzles generally fall into "way too easy" and "fiddly and awkward". Note: I also notice questions and issues in discussions are met with "we've asked a developer to take a look at that" and no response ever comes back - so we can assume it's dead at this point and therefore it's a "Not Recommended" from me

Addictive as hell! But you need to know the basics of Regex! Because unfortunately, the explanations are really bare-bones. (Reading the reviews, this put off a lot of people. Which is a shame: The Dev could just add more detailed, in depth explanations. All it costs is a bit of his time.) If you actually want to learn Regex, one step at the time, each step with a detailed explanation plus an interactive example, go here: https://regexone.com/ I find this the easiest, best resource to get started with Regex. Here are some other, free regex games alternatives, where you can learn something: This is super cute: https://www.therobinlord.com/projects/slash-escape Medium: https://www.jeffwofford.com/regex/ This is hard: https://alf.nu/RegexGolf Have fun.

The game already links to regex101.com - so the developer must know how to present a regular expression editor in a sensible way but decided against it. The font isn't mono-spaced, spaces are invisible and you have to switch the view to know what you are matching against. Additionally the left and right text view scroll for some unknown reason independent of each other - why would I ever want that? It's not a bad idea for a game, but crippling the tool in order to make it challenging can't be the right way to do it...

I'm a programmer who rarely uses regexes so when I stumbled upon this game I figured I might as well go learn them. Reading the reviews I was fully ready to be googling and researching on my own without the game spoon-feeding me. But what I wasn't ready for though, is a clunky and annoying puzzle game. :/ While nothing is fundamentally wrong with the game per se, it's simply full of small quirks and issues that do add up. Plus the puzzles themselves are really meh as far as I've seen. I really hated the one with the heart pattern in which you must squint your eyes and keep counting entire lines of non-monospace characters to figure out the solution. And then the next level is about Caesar cipher; the solution is to manually add a ton of rules to replace one character with another (fun right?) but to make it more "challenging" your keyboard itself is also affected by the Caesar cipher. So you use a piece of paper or an excel sheet to de-cipher your keyboard first, then add all the rules. I mean, look, the solution is literally explained to you in the beginning; this "puzzle" is 0% difficulty and 100% waste of time. This was the uninstall point for me. Like others have said, don't even consider buying this if you don't know regexes and want a learning dive. Google will do so much better for you. As for people familiar with them, this seems to be an annoying waste of time above all else.

Not particularly good or bad. A strange mix of extremely easy and extremely difficult. The game introduces a lot of concepts without any explanation. If you're not experienced with regex, prepare to browse documentation. I was hoping for a better learning experience and have learned more by simply opening the easiest tutorials on Google.

I was coming in with the expectation of a game similar to a zachtronic game, but this game is just a badly structured regex tutorial with horrendous UX and some rough narrative. If you want something more fun and immersive, I'd recommend going to somewhere like codewars.com and looking up Regex challenges there.

The basic idea of the game is that you use regular expressions to identify sections of text and then you replace those sections of text. Okay, so I'm not a Perl wizard but I should know regex well enough to play a regex game. Levels 1, 2 and 3 are fine. But, on level 4 you get hit with a truck. A Mack Truck going 90 mph down the highway. First off, the problem on level 4 isn't amendable to regex. You normally use regular expressions to identify text that you want to pull out of a document for some reason or to verify that input matches some set of rules, you normally do not use regex to search and replace (unless you are using a tool like Sed with its own DSL). You realize this straight away when you realize that your regexes are applied sequentially and so clobber one another (which is hard to avoid given the changes you are supposed to make to the document). Second, when you hit level 4, you encounter a whole bunch of characters that I don't even know how to regex. Like, for example, a paragraph break. It turns out that the author has modeled paragraph breaks as a newline \n but that's not stated anywhere. More difficult, is that the author in the text uses true quotes, the ones that curl, but when you type a quote mark in the editor, it gives you the straight quotes that you get in a text editor like VIM or EMACS, but they don't match what you need to replace! All of this aside, I recommend the game because a regular expression game is a great idea, and there should be more of them, and the author provides the solutions if you need them. @the developer, good game, with a good idea, but a bit more polish is necessary to take it from good to great!

As someone who is not familiar with RegEx, this game severely lacks on the teaching side. Even just for the very first level of the game, it literally just gives you a spreadsheet or RegEx rules, and then good luck. What?? How is different from googling how to do RegEx?? And the rules are so barely minimally explained, stackoverflow can give a 10x better explanation. Each operation literally has just one line of explanation, and some even without examples, like the () operation, this is what it had on the instruction: Find: "(ab)l(e)" matches all instances of "able" as if parentheses are not there, but if $1 is used in the replace function, "ab" is substituted, while $2 substitutes "e" and so on. What??? Can't you at least put a example with context here? This game should not be marketed as "teaches" you RegEx, because it expects you to learn RegEx on your own first, then come back and do the puzzles. There is no teaching at all besides you reading the pathetically written one liner explanation and either 1) start googling the rules to get a better understanding of what they do then start doing the puzzle 2) spend the next 15 mins trying out the rules to figure out what each does exactly, which is essentially the same as googling, hell, google might be faster. There is no difference between "playing" this game and you watch youtube video then practice the newly learned RegEx on some random paragraph in sublime text. I think this game at the current release is for someone who already knows RegEx and serves as a good entertainment for them probably, definitely not for beginners, and in no aspect this game is teaching you.