>The only reason I can think that Nadya wants to avoid using a language hosting regular expressions is for performance. Parsing one string is one thing. Parsing a gazillion, which she seems to do rather regularly, is another. I know we're speaking in generalities here, but what sort of overhead does calling VBS.RegEx from VFP have over using native VFP commands?
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I don't know why she has a problem; the cost is a COM call per validation. The problem is general enough that I'd want to be able to apply a lexical parser of some sort to handle the problem. In this case, it appears to be validation of an input field, given the approach being taken, so I doubt that overhead is a real issue, but I could be wrong. I have my own ideas behind what her agenda might be, but they're nothing more than unfounded hypotheses, so I'll just leave it at I don't have what I'd consider a reasonable solution given the constraints on the solution as stated. I could solve it any number of ways, but they'd either be too expensive in terms of processing time, or in terms of my time to write.