I have a need

[John Morris]

Hi David,
  The world is full of imperfections. We each can choose to rail against them or find a way to work around them. Yes, it would be nice if I could just tell the computer what I wanted in natural language. However, that is not the case. I don't find it productive to cry and moan about how difficult the available tools are. Rather, I do my best to learn to use them.

  Fortunately, grep is a ubiquitous and powerful system for searching all sorts of data. There are many online resources to learn how to use it and it greatly facilitates all kinds of data-manipulation tasks. I encourage you to get over your fear of it and broaden your horizons.

  For the GnuCash FAQ, I would not suggest trying to duplicate all those online resources. Rather, if it is not already there, I would only add a comment that they are out there and perhaps link to one or two.

Best,
John

>     John, 
> Thank you for this information.  I think it is very helpful for a limited usage case as you clearly describe.
> David T. and some users and I can follow your instructions and figure out how to adapt them to our particular data sets, but it would still be difficult to generalize to the point of writing a paragraph to put in the GnuCash FAQ for our entire spectrum of users, many of whom know nothing of RegEx and have no desire to learn.
> I would invite you to try to write something for the FAQ and submit it here for inclusion.
> David C