Not shy at all...

[Jeanne A. E. DeVoto]

At 7:42 PM +0100 6/6/2004, Alex Tweedly wrote:
>I'll leave specific comments to those who know better, but doing all 
>the manipulation in the same field looks inefficient - put the 
>processed sections into a separate (results) field (and don't 
>display it until done).

You're mostly right - it actually is much faster to do it all in 
memory, that is, in a variable. Putting data into a field is a slow 
operation. (Or if the dataset is too large, reading it into a 
variable in chunks and processing it there will still be much more 
efficient than doing it in a field.)

>From an outsider's point of view, the lack of a regular expression 
>package in Revolution looks like it will make this (the real 
>problem, not the simple first step) a harder problem than it need 
>have been. One of the things that attracted me to Revolution was a 
>statement along the lines of  "text processing like you've never 
>seen" - but I haven't found anything to justify that claim yet. The 
>built-in tokenizing is neat, but hardly revolutionary, and the 
>apparent lack of RE looks like a big missing feature. (Please tell 
>me it's in there and I just missed it in the docs ....)

Just do a search for "regular expression" - it's in there.
-- 
jeanne a. e. devoto ~ jaed at jaedworks.com
http://www.jaedworks.com