[GNC] 8.1.1. Find Transaction

[Peter West]

Regular expressions are beautiful and powerful things. Perl (the language) was a laboratory for extending the reach of REs. In your travels you may come across PCRE regular expressions; that is Perl Compatible Regular Expressions. They are stunning.

Once you get the hang of even basic REs, you’ll wonder how you ever made do without them.

Make sure to get yourself a text editor with good RE support, because they are enormously useful for editing text.


--
Peter West
pbw at pbw.id.au
“…whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.”

> On 4 Oct 2020, at 6:15 am, Michael or Penny Novack <stepbystepfarm at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> On 10/3/2020 11:19 AM, David Carlson wrote:
>> We are't dead yet, and a couple of our approximate peers are actively seeking terms in the white house.  One of them having tested positive for Covid, hoping he will recover.
> 
> 
> I am going to add something. Matching strings using "regular expressions" is VERY powerful. But as is common with powerful tools, there is a non-trivial learning curve. It might not take you learn how to create the right regex for simple matches. Then somewhat longer to ensure that they not only match what you want them to (no misses) but also not match what anything else (false positives). The latter is not so worrisome if you are just doing a "find", then "find next" as you can skip over the "errors". But if that were a find/replace operation ..........
> 
> But it might take you a much longer time to learn to correctly match say "all words starting with the letter "b", either upper lower case, second letter lower case "e", and ending in "ing". Thus should match "being", "becoming", "beekeeping", etc. but not "unbecoming" or "be thinking".
> 
> Expect to be testing/debugging your regular expressions, at least at the start.
> 
> Michael D Novack
> 
> 
> 
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