I did some basic investigation into the ability of OOo Calc reg expressions...
http://www.openofficetips.com/blog/archives/2005/11/regular_express.html On 11/27/05, Matej Cepl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Zoltán Kócsi wrote: > > Regexp is a fairly complex beast and probably quite unnatural unless > > you have some sort of programming training. In that sense it is > > questionable how useful regexps are in a generic word processor for the > > general public, but if you happen to have regexp experience by using > > tools like perl, awk, grep, lex and alike then you can express quite > > complex searches efficiently. > > OK, first of all there is a famous cite of Jamie Zawinski (on > <http://www.jwz.org/hacks/marginal.html>): `(Some people, when confronted > with a problem, think ``I know, I'll use regular expressions.'' Now they > have two problems.)' There is something about that :-). Nevertheless, I use > regexps quite often and when limited to useful level of complexity, they > could be quite useful. But, it *IS* difficult to use them and learning > curve *IS* quite steep. Perl (probably the best and fastest implementation > of RE currently available) has four manpages for RE (perlrequick, > perlretut, perlre, and perlreref). > > Sideshow for serious geeks: first read this > http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/08/22/PJre, > http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/08/26/PJre2, and > http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/11/20/Regex-Promises. > Explanation of this mystery is here > http://perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=502408 (apparently Perl has support > for so complex REs where all other RE implementations break down). And BTW > I do not use Perl if I don't have to (much prefer Python, but apparently > here Perl is better than anybody else). > > Back to our main presentation tonight: there seems to be two ways how to > deal with REs in OpenOffice.org (and elsewhere). Either you will ignore > them, or you will bite the bullet and learn them. Actually, the first way > is not so ridiculous as it seems to be. As it was repeated many times by > vi-people (vi-family editors don't have anything else than RE for > searching): "plain string is valid RE and as such will be evaluated" (let's > ignore case sensitivity of REs for a moment); i.e., when you are searching > for "moron", you can just put "moron" into your RE field and everything > will work as expected. Being in this position you are not worse off, then > if there were no REs at all. > > However, learning REs is not so difficult as it seems to be from looking at > some really advanced examples (yeah, sure you want some examples; this RE > in Python syntax r"(\d{3})\D*(\d{3})\D*(\d{4})\D*(\d*)$" parses US phone > numbers and returns their parts in different fields; courtesy of Mark > Pilgrim from <http://www.diveintopython.org>). You can begin for starters > with just something so simple as "colou?r" and even that will be incredibly > helpful. Just throw "regular expression tutorial" into your friendly Google > and you will find a lot of stuff which can help. You have to be aware only > of couple of things---first of all, that there are at least two > incompatible lines of REs living well "in wild" (for more info on that read > > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression> on Wikipedia). The best > way how to deal with this is to learn just the type of RE used in the > application you're going to use (for OOo I just randomly stumbled upon > <http://homepage.ntlworld.com/garryknight/linux/ooregexp.html>). BTW, you > could just go to Help "List of Regular Expression", but it is really just a > reference material, which is not enough for somebody who doesn't what's > going on. > > The last thing---thank you, OOo developers, that you have included > full-size > REs into OOo and not something crippled like "wildcards" in M$ Word (which > is just a small subset of REs packaged for non-geeks). This and other > things (XSLT filters and scripting, albeit the latter is severly > underdocumented) made OOo much more than just another free office > suite-like (there are others), but serious platform for doing things in the > proper geek-like way. Thanks! > > So that's my small epistole about RE (you can find it also on > http://www.ceplovi.cz/matej/blog/computer/ooo-re-2005-11-27-17-21.html). > > Blessings, > > Matej > -- > Matej Cepl, http://www.ceplovi.cz/matej/blog/ > GPG Finger: 89EF 4BC6 288A BF43 1BAB 25C3 E09F EF25 D964 84AC > > The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they > can bribe the people with their own money. > -- Alexis de Tocqueville > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > -- My OpenOffice Calc Website http://www.openofficetips.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
