>Check the Strextract() function!
I used to be a HUGE fan of the STREXTRACT function until Craig Boyd showed me that Regular Expressions can be nearly 100x faster.
I re-wrote some HTML parsing routines that used to take an hour or more to run using VFP string manipulation functions. With regular expression, they now take about a minute.
Even using Jos's example, I ran a test on an HTML file with 5000 <img> tags. Using STRTRAN+STREXTRACT it took 9.810 seconds, but using Regular Expressions it took 0.100 seconds!