by it I mean that the act of preparing regular-expressions (and in the case of sed, any looping logic etc.) is the key factor.
In summary, the best helper tools are experience and structured layout, and read the manual (in detail).
I feel that GUI tools don't really help much, because they inhibit the experience. Tackling the regex questions on this site is a great way to get that experience. The best tool to help you is: experience. I don't need it now because of the experience :) Actually just laying out commands, one per line, is almost as good as the perl feature. (As a challenge, and for the expereince factor, I wrote a sed parser to parse my sed code to allow such whitespace. the ability to ignore whitespace in your expression. Perl regex has some useful features to assist in laying out complex patterns eg. From that, it is just a process of starting small and getting the simple things working then build up to bigger things to gain experience. The best tool I've ever found to assist me with dealing with sed is quite simply: I read the manual in detail. It has a funky cryptic set of commands for looping and condition testing this takes time to get used to. The issue with sed is not just the regular expressions. Here is a typical example of what I mean: A sed regex showing structured layout.Ī very handy feature of sed is its debugging command l, which is a simple line dump showing the pattern space with embedded newlines shown as \n, etc. Really, sed is just a scripting language, and it can be laid out like other languages, ie. If you are like me, I find it impossible to work with complex regular expressions, unless I lay them out in a structured manner, so I can get a better visual representation of the logic. I'm not quite sure what you mean by "visually create the code" (do you mean a GUI tool?).