September 23, 2002
If you're using a text editor without regular expression support, let me ask you: why?? Get yourself a better piece of software.
I was just handed a tab-delimited text file that needed to be converted to an Excel spreadsheet for a mail merge. Address fields were not properly separated by tabs, though, so the import into Excel wasn't going smoothly. No problem! A quick regular expression find-and-replace, and bam! Problem solved. 4000 records updated to a usable format. Total time expended, including discovering the problem: 3 minutes.
Regular expressions rock.
