6. A computer-implemented method of designing a regular expression, comprising: storing data in a computer-readable medium; displaying at least a portion of the stored data in a data view via a processor, wherein the stored information is stored in a plurality of different data formats; applying metadata that defines how data files of each different data format type are to be parsed, such that a generic parser is usable for parsing the plurality of different stored data types; enabling a user to graphically and arbitrarily select any one or more sections of the displayed data, regardless of the data format; automatically generating a regular expression comprising one or more specialized characters or character sets that have a predefined meaning for parsing text, the regular expression being derived from and based on the graphically and arbitrarily selected section of data; enabling the user to apply the regular expression to a body of text; and displaying text that matches the regular expression in at least one of a tabulated viewing area or a column viewing area, wherein the rendered regular expression comprises a custom metadata annotation applied by the generic parser indicating the data type of the selected portion of text, and wherein the automatically generated regular expression is displayed in syntactical form including the one or more specialized characters and/or character sets, and wherein rendering the rendered regular expression comprises implementing a heuristics component that employs at least one of a probabilistic-based or statistical-based analysis to automatically generate the regular expression.
7. The computer-implemented method of claim 6 , further comprising enabling the user to apply an annotation to one or more portions of the regular expression, wherein the annotation comprises at least one of coloring, highlighting, or font formatting of the one or more portions of the regular expression, and wherein the annotation is applied to text displayed in at least the tabulated or column viewing area that matches the one or more portions of the regular expression.