>>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!

I also saw Craig's demonstartions in Phoenix last October, and was very impessed. The drawback is the learning curve and the total lack of readability. The expressions easily become pretty complex.