RegExs aren't bad!
Spend most of the day setting up some hardware at the daughter's house so I could reclaim my laptop (Hint: two hard drives in one Windows machine is almost as good as two machines…bad sectors and security descriptors in boot files—and I wish I knew how it happened so I can NOT do it—is gotten around by switching the boot order of the two drives and installing Win XP on the second (now first) drive…then waiting for Scandisk and ChkDsk to fix what looks like everything).
Meanwhile, last night, early this morning and for the last hour I've been buried in regular expressions and now I feel like an idiot for not studying it before. Folks have called it a Black Art, but it's really straightforward with a syntax guide and a good testing tool at hand.
There are apparently several regex testing programs around. I've only tried The Regulator, a .NET program which is on SourceForge and let me tell you I am impressed because I would NOT have had it as easy as I have without this beastie. If you use regular expressions a lot, you need this program. And if you only use them infrequently you REALLY need this program.
