Filtering Columnar Data

[Gregory Lypny]

Hello Everyone,

I'm struggling with the filter command.  I have tab-delimited data in  
a field, where each row has at least 56 columns.  I want to filter  
the data based on a chosen number in that fourth column, for example,  
to return all lines that have a 9 there.  The fourth column only  
contains a number from 1 to 10.  The following handler works most of  
the time.  I put three wild card expressions, lone asterisks  
separated by tabs, to make sure nothing is being picked up in the  
first three columns.  The tab and asterisk (and it could be just an  
*) following myNumber says that it doesn't matter what is in the  
columns after the fourth.

	put fld "Data" of this card into tmpData
	filter tmpData with "*" & tab & "*" & tab & "*" & tab & myNumber &  
tab & "*"

The trouble is, the first three wild card expressions are interpreted  
by Revolution to include tab characters, which means that I'm not  
necessarily filtering the fourth column!  If a 9 appears by itself in  
column 58, then the filter command will pick it up.  Sigh.

I also tried the following, but I don't think I have the regular  
expression syntax right.

    filter it with "[A-Z0-9]" & tab & "[0-9]" & tab & "[A-Z]" & tab &  
myNumber & tab & "*"

I know that my first column always contains five words, two of which  
are numbers.  I wasn't sure how to represent the four spaces between  
the words.  The second column is always a seven-digit number.  The  
third contains first and last names, which will contain at least two  
words.  This turns up empty.

Any advice would be most appreciated.  If I can't get the RegEx  
working for me, I know I can resort to a repeat loop and pull out all  
lines with myNumber in the fourth item.

Regards,

	Gregory