How do you debug a regex?

With Perl 5.10, use re 'debug';. (Or debugcolor, but I can't format the output properly on Stack Overflow.)

$ perl -Mre=debug -e'"foobar"=~/(.)\1/'
Compiling REx "(.)\1"
Final program:
   1: OPEN1 (3)
   3:   REG_ANY (4)
   4: CLOSE1 (6)
   6: REF1 (8)
   8: END (0)
minlen 1
Matching REx "(.)\1" against "foobar"
   0 <> <foobar>             |  1:OPEN1(3)
   0 <> <foobar>             |  3:REG_ANY(4)
   1 <f> <oobar>             |  4:CLOSE1(6)
   1 <f> <oobar>             |  6:REF1(8)
                                  failed...
   1 <f> <oobar>             |  1:OPEN1(3)
   1 <f> <oobar>             |  3:REG_ANY(4)
   2 <fo> <obar>             |  4:CLOSE1(6)
   2 <fo> <obar>             |  6:REF1(8)
   3 <foo> <bar>             |  8:END(0)
Match successful!
Freeing REx: "(.)\1"

Also, you can add whitespace and comments to regexes to make them more readable. In Perl, this is done with the /x modifier. With pcre, there is the PCRE_EXTENDED flag.

"foobar" =~ /
    (.)  # any character, followed by a
    \1   # repeat of previously matched character
/x;

pcre *pat = pcre_compile("(.)  # any character, followed by a\n"
                         "\\1  # repeat of previously matched character\n",
                         PCRE_EXTENDED,
                         ...);
pcre_exec(pat, NULL, "foobar", ...);

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