Subject Re: manipulating a string From Charlie <tm@tc.com> Date Tue, 22 Mar 2022 16:47:12 -0400 Newsgroups dbase.getting-started Wow Mervyn this is great.  I thought it was going to be a big project and was panning on doing it a different way.  But this works perfectly. I didn't think of doing the table and images separately which will work great. I forgot to mention that I only wanted to do this for skus that begin with "LI" at this time.  It was easy to filter the table, but I am not sure how to handle this with the images.  Would it be an addition to the if statement? Thanks so much!   Mervyn Bick Wrote: > 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.