Yay! It's available! It requires Perl 5.6.0! It's probably buggy! The code is kinda ugly! It's not documented! It doesn't support the word boundary anchors (\b and \B)!

It currently supports regex-to-string and regex-reversal conversions. It handles backreferences (and nested backrefs) quite nicely. I've not seen any bugs in it so far, in the rigorous, totally NOT run-of-the-mill regexes I've run through it.

If you're interested, please download the source at my web site. The module comes with two test suites. Both will ask for a regex. Just give it the "meat" of the regex -- that is, leave off the m/ and / part.

Example Run

jeffp% perl string-test 
Enter your regex below (keep it normalish).
(\w{5})-(\d{2,4})\.txt
regex is  : '(\w{5})-(\d{2,4})\.txt'
matched by: 't1nif-19.txt'

jeffp% perl string-test 
Enter your regex below (keep it normalish).
(\w{5})-(\d){3}-\1-\2
regex is  : '(\w{5})-(\d){3}-\1-\2'
matched by: 'rqqxI-754-rqqxI-4'


jeffp% perl reverse-test 
Enter your regex below (keep it normalish).
(\w{5})-(\d{2,4})\.txt
normal  : '(\w{5})-(\d{2,4})\.txt'
reversed: 'txt\.(\d{2,4})-(\w{5})'
normal  : '(\w{5})-(\d{2,4})\.txt'
matchfor: 'Fr4eD-978.txt'
matchrev: 'txt.3582-jEp9c'
matchfor: 'UMVGk-5838.txt'

jeffp% perl reverse-test 
Enter your regex below (keep it normalish).
(\w{5})-(\d){3}-\1-\2
normal  : '(\w{5})-(\d){3}-\1-\2'
reversed: '(\d)-(\w{5})-\1(?:\d){2}-\2'
normal  : '(\w{5})-(?:\d){2}(\d)-\1-\2'
matchfor: '85F7g-464-85F7g-4'
matchrev: '3-n7s1h-349-n7s1h'
matchfor: 'rWwij-705-rWwij-5'
[download]

The 'matchfor' is a match for the normal regex, the 'matchrev' is a match for the reversed (YES, REVERSED!) regex, and the second 'matchfor' is a match of the reversed reversed regex (which is an "optimized" version of the original regex).

Download it! Have fun! Make the sleep I've lost over this project MEANINGFUL!

$_="goto+F.print+chop;\n=yhpaj";F1:eval