We pushed several new updates to Pipes based on the comments we’ve been receiving at the Pipes Suggestion Board. They include:

* A new Split Module, for creating duplicate copies of feeds.

* Significant bugfixes to both the Filter and Regex Modules, so that pattern matching will now work correctly with Chinese and Russian text, and Unicode in general.

* A significant bugfix to the Translate Module, it should no longer mangle encoding.

* The introduction of a new URL syntax across the site (note: these changes should be backwards compatible for Pipes that users have already subscribed to.)

* The list of sources associated with a Pipe now appears on the run page.

As always, we look forward to hearing what you think!

It was only a matter of time before we included a module that utilized the power of regular expressions. If you’re at all familiar with them, you’ve probably already been craving for a module like this in Pipes. Now you can use Perl-like regular expressions to help you filter and replace with more flexibility. Learn more about regular expressions or check out one of our example Pipes that uses the module.

As if that wasn’t enough, we’ve also improved on the editor’s load time so when you load up a Pipe, it should load up on the canvas faster!

We’ve replaced the hover tooltips for the modules to a little help window in the bottom left of the editor. Now whenever you click on a module on the left toolbar, you’ll see a description of the module underneath. For modules on the canvas, you can still get information on it by selecting the [?] on the module. More help = better Pipes!

This evening we added a new Module to the Pipes Editor. The Rename Module can be found under the Operators category. This Module lets you rename or copy item attributes within a feed. Here’s an example of how it works. We hope you find it useful!

We’ve received a lot of requests for a way to preview a Pipe that you’re working on in the Editor.

Yesterday, we added the new “Pipe Preview…” link at the top of the Pipes Editor. It lets you easily view the hosted version of a saved Pipe. This link appears whenever you save the Pipe you’re editing. Since any unsaved changes to the Pipe won’t be reflected properly the link disappears until you save your changes.

As a helpful tip, the Debugger window can be used to inspect each segment of your Pipe to make sure it is behaving as expected. Selecting a Module in your Pipe will cause the Debugger to display its output. In the Debugger, click on the small triangle to the left of each item title to examine its contents in more detail.

Please give these options a try and let us know what you think!