[Info-vax] Looking for some text search ideas

[Jan-Erik Soderholm]

Paul Sture wrote 2014-09-27 14:01:
> On 2014-09-27, VAXman-  @SendSpamHere.ORG <VAXman- at SendSpamHere.ORG> wrote:
>> In article <o1iifb-02c1.ln1 at news.chingola.ch>, Paul Sture <nospam at sture.ch> writes:
>>> On 2014-09-27, David Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> But now you mention a "regular expression engine".  Never heard of such.
>>>>    Guess I need to look up the term to see what it's about.  Maybe time
>>>> for this old dog to learn something new.
>>>
>>> "Regular expressions" (rexex or rexexp for short) are not an easy concept
>>> to get your head around.  At first glance it's incomprehensible Geekery
>>> expressed as gibberish.  You might want to delegate here :-)
>>
>> "Regular expressions" are incomprehensible Geekery expressed as gibberish
>> to denote WHAT to search for but it does NOT specify the mechanics of HOW
>> to search for it!
>
> True, but Craig specifically mentioned the word "engine" and then Jan-Erik
> mentioned "libraries".  It's always a compromise though.  If there aren't
> such libraries available for the flavour of Basic David is using then he's
> going to get into the joys of the system management side of Perl or Python
> or...  (shouldn't be much, but it's yet another cost in man hours).
>

I'm quite sure that regexp is *not* the answer for actual issues.
It is not that complex, and you'd put the burdon on the user to
come up with the actual regexp. That does not work, of course.
I'm sure it will all end up in some simply test search
sequantial over the data/file/table...

Jan-Erik.