Currently in our software we provide a hook where we call a DLL built by our clients to parse information out of documents we are processing (the DLL takes in some text (or a file) and returns a list of name/value pairs).

e.g. We're given a Word doc or Text file to Archive. We do various things to the file, and call a DLL that will return "pertinent" information about the file. Among other things we store that "pertinent" data for posterity.

What is considered "pertinent" depends on the client and the type of the document, we don't care, we get it and store it.

I've been asked to develop a user friendly "something" that will allow a non-programmer user to "configure" how to get this data from a plain text document (<humor>The user story ends with the helpful suggestion/query "We could use regex for this?"</humor>)

It's safe to assume that a list of regex's isn't going to cut this, I've written some of these parsers for customers, the regex's to do these would be hedious and some of them can't be done by regex's. Also one of the requirements above is "user friendly" which negates anything that has users seeing or editing regex expressions.

As you can guess, I don't have a fortune of time to do this, and am wondering is there anything out there that I can plug in to our app that has a nice front end and does exactly what I need? :)

No? Whadda mean no! . . . sigh

Ok then failing that, anything out there that "visually" builds regex's and/or other pattern matching expressions, and then allows one to run those expressions against some text?

The MS BRE will do what I want, but I need something prettier that looks less like code.

Thanks guys,