Subject Re: manipulating a string From Mervyn Bick <invalid@invalid.invalid> Date Tue, 22 Mar 2022 17:26:15 +0200 Newsgroups dbase.getting-started On 2022/03/20 23:29, Lee Grant wrote: > Mervyn, > > Thanks for showing me one way to use my new regex skills in dBASE with > this example.  I've heard you mention you like using it here, but wasn't > sure how you did that. Now I know. :) I first looked at regular expressions when Michael Nuwer published an article in Issue 20 of the dBulletin back in March 2005. https://www.jpmartel.com/bulletin.htm It's a bit of a learning curve but the gain is well worth the pain. And once one is comfortable with it all sorts of uses come to mind. I've used it to add HTML tags, remove HTML tags, find URLs in HTML pages, find telephone numbers in HTML pages, add responses to HTML pages, highlight words in memo fields, convert UNIX text files to Windows text files and vice versa, create a list of all my example code that uses externs and a list of code that uses RegExp. Most of these tasks can be done using the dBASE string handling functions.  The RegExp solution is, however, usually significantly less code and significantly faster. To use the dBASE functions usually means reading a source file a line at a time, a check to see if action is needed, if so do it, write the line back to an output file and then read the next line.  With RegExp one can read the entire file into memory, do the test which is virtually instantaneous, and then do the replace which is again virtually instantaneous. The changed text in memory can then be written out in one write. For a single file the time saving may not be significant but if one has to churn through many files it's different story. Mervyn.