Re: regular expressions help please

In article <5.0.2.1.0.20020430004147.032752a8@mail.atfantasy.com>, osmosis@atfantasy.com (Ed Lazor) wrote: > I've been banging my head against regular expressions all night... help > would be greatly appreciated. Could you give me examples on how to do the > following? > > Pull everything except a specific word from a sentence. <snip more examples> First you need to decide what you mean by "word". If it's simply "the stuff separated by a space", then you might find it simpler to explode your sentences on the space character, then loop through the resulting array using string functions to do your comparisons . Regex is great for the power and flexibility it offers, but if you're really struggling with the syntax, using constructs that are more familiar may help you move forward. On the other hand, it's frequently the case that one needs a more sophisticated definition of "word". Is it just adjacent letters? What if they're interrupted by a hyphen? Are leading/trailing punctuation marks included? Do adjacent digits count as words? Etc. Once you've defined the pattern comprising a "word", you can then translate it into regex--or get more help from others in making the translation. -- CC