Text patterns and Regular Expressions?

[kennedy]

Looking at the Text functions, it doesn't seem they support regular expressions of any kind! Is that so?

Is there any reasonable way to do things like find the Position of the first numeral in a Text string?

Parsing info out of fields and imports would seem to be bread-n-butter for a database app; in fact, FileMaker would be the only one I've seen that lacks regular expressions.

[LiveOak]

Left(TextToNum(field), 1)

-bd

[kennedy]

Ha! That's clever! Cool... I can use that.

How about:

1) Find the position of the first character in the set [,.;_-]??

2) Find the position of the first alphabetic character? [A-Za-z]

3) Find the position of the first alpha-numeric? [A-Za-z0-9]

4) Find the position of the first string that starts with sequence of alphbetic characters and then a numeral? /[A-Za-z]+[0-9]/

If all that's doable without regexp's with similarly short expressions, I'll be very impressed.

[LiveOak]

1) Min(

Position(text,",",1,1),

Position(text,".",1,1),

Position(text,";",1,1),

Position(text,":",1,1),

Position(text,"(",1,1),

Position(text,")",1,1),

Position(text,"_",1,1),

Position(text,"-",1,1)

)

2) same but longer

3) same but much longer

4) Let me think about it.

-bd

[kennedy]

So, am I the only one who thinks a data processing system should have bread-n-butter regular expressions? I mean basic Unix commands have better ability to manipulate incoming data! I am amazed it could make it to version 5 without them.

[Keith M. Davie]

"So, am I the only one who thinks a data processing system should have bread-n-butter regular expressions?" Perhaps.

Then again, perhaps you should just say Thank You to bd who is taking the time and effort to simplify your learning curve with FileMaker. It appears that positing your queries here is easier for you than having to RTFM.

[LiveOak]

I've never been totally happy with the text processing abilities of any language since SNOBOL 4 (Bell Labs circa 1970)! I think FM will eventually get there. There is a perpetual conflict at FMI. They want to keep the development team as small as possible so the product doesn't look like MS Word (written by a cast of thousands), they always have requests for many more good features than they have time to implement, and they want to remain a product usable by people new to FM.

FMI always presents their famous (sypder?) chart that show their market applicability. At present they are not the solution for enterprise level solutions written by 100's of database programmers over years of effort.

Many additional features are also "filled in" by the available plug-ins which significantly extend FM's capabilities. For instance, file handling, encription, serial communications, compound multi-key construction, graphing and charting, and other capabilities are provided by plug-ins. An industrial strength text parser plug-in is not out of the question.

-bd

[kennedy]

Then again, perhaps you should just say Thank You to bd who is taking the time and effort to simplify your learning curve with FileMaker. It appears that positing your queries here is easier for you than having to RTFM.

Hmmmm... RTFM? I have read every page of the FileMaker help files and all of the book Special Edition Using FMP... and I re-search those and search this forum prior to asking any question. The info is not always there. As for this thread, all searches for "regular expression" netted nothing. I found that implausible, so I figured FMP must call it something else or have a completely different way of handling it. My last query is to see whether its not as common in others' experience to need stuff like that as it is in mine (any halfway challenging import calls can benefit from regexp's in my experience; many validations can benefit from regexp's). And given some of my questions you smart guys didn't know the answers to... I think at least a few aren't RTFM's.

My apologies if I am asking too many questions...

And my many thanks to LiveOak, CobaltSky, captkurt, harryk, GIV, djgogi, falkaholic, yourself, and many others for answering my questions the last week. Its been very helpful. And I've been trying to give back where I can... but as it so kindly broadcasts on every note, I am just a Newbie...

Thanks again,

Brian