Quick bit of local advocacy... all London telephone numbers change on 22nd April
2000. (0171 xxx xxxx becomes 020 7xxx xxxx and 0181 xxx xxxx becomes 020 8xxx
xxxx).
5 other cities also change their area codes, and all mobile and pager numbers
change too (see http://www.numberchange.org/ for full details if you may be
affected).
Faced with a variety of spreadsheets, databases and text files full of possible
phone numbers (implied area codes, "220 8537 / 8 / 9", "am 0171 ..., pm 0181
..." etc.), Perl has of course been the tool of choice for conversion in this
bank, and has come through with flying colours.
Hats off also to ActiveStates PDK which let me make a PerlCOM object within VBA
in Excel and the such like, so that I could easily run a VB macro that invoked
my perl on the selected cells etc.
RegExps are great, but more than that it's the ability to integrate into
anything (which many other languages still lack) that made this such a pushover.
Cheers
Tim
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