General Discussions

**Learning Newbie** · 03-05-2008, 02:44 PM

Has anybody had experience with this, or just me?

A web application tester told me he can pull a directory listing of all his mp3 into Excel, then use a regular expression to figure out which ones are good bands and which are 1 hit wonders. That's what you call a crack head. Pattern matching against text data can't tell you how good a song that's mentioned is!

Lots of people say things like if regular expressions were magical. I believe the guy when he says he uses them, but I bet he puts a list of all his favorite bands into the search string. Or something else. But it's not that the regular expression said "Oh, hey, it's Ronny James Dio - I think I'm gonna puke!"

Have any of you run into people who use regular expressions to make coffee, clean their house, or raise their children?

**cbwm** · 03-06-2008, 07:28 PM

I can use them to determine if a poster has Kommunist leanings. Is that useful?

**Learning Newbie** · 03-06-2008, 08:38 PM

You wrote a regular expression to look in the mirror and say "Yup, there's one"? Or in your search string have you redefined communist since you've redefined the alphabet?

**ADAM Web Design** · 03-06-2008, 08:56 PM

Now now, John, play nice with our hammer and sickle-toting friend.

The only way I could see regular expressions being used for this is if you took each artist's name and did a count on how many times that name appeared. But then again, Excel can be opened (at least in ASP) using a connection object, recordset object and SQL queries...so I don't see why you can't run a count query.

Then again, I've only just started learning about regular expressions.