>>>A regular expression can be far more than a simple string match; it can include simple or complex wildcarding, matches of restricted character sets, patterns and a great deal more. I posted a message a while ago that used a single regular expression to replace a multi-line UDF used to validate a patterned string, and offered significantly greater flexibility and adaptability using it. Regular expressions are widely used by many comand line tools like Perl and languages like Java, and represent a widely-accepted standard in their own right.
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>>That's what I thought. Let me ask you this. Is there a standard syntax for regular expressions. I see the RegExp object has some info on building expressions. Is this a standard? If so are there regular expressions already built for common things like URL's. If not are there regular expressions already built for the RegExp object.
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>There are tons of examples - try most of the scripting sites in my sig block and you'll find tons of examples; I don't know of a site that collects various Regular Expressions, but, hey, search the web, they're probably there. I use them constanly for doing validation, data format translation, string parsing; once you know the rules for regular expressions, you can use them as you like. There's a good, brief summary of the currently supported regular expression terms in the WSH docs, and in "VBScript Programmer's Reference Manual" from Wrox Press, one of the books that's never far from my desk, since it has summaries of VBScript, the WSH, Regular expressions, ADO, and the IE DOM in the Appendix.
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>Frankly, once you know the syntax, it's kind of like the VFP Query Builder - sure you could use it an look it up, but it rapidly gets to be second nature.


Thanks for all the great info. I can see myself using regexp more and substr less that's for sure. I'll just have to get into the sytax and figure it out.