On Dec 29, 11:41 pm, Bob Cox wrote:


Regular expressions are wonderful things and have been around
for ages; as over 5 million matches for 'regexp' on Google will
testify, but there seems to be little relevance to weather.

I beg to differ. If you are composing anything for printing or posting
to a web page you might find the short cuts helpful, especially if you
want to rearrange data.

Pasting stuff between Writer and Calc for example can be a pain if you
don't know what the reg exp are.

I couldn't find the ones I needed after I found that my copy of
Microsoft Office was causing problems with stability in Windows XP for
me.

I haven't had a BSOD with this computer since I got it and dared not
put my M$ Office on it. I had all the reg exp that I needed for that
but the damn things were impossible to find for Open.

It turns out I was looking for the wrong thing. Which is typical in
the poor nomenclature of having a monopolist running a system geared
up for one system only whereas with open source stuff, the ethos is on
an interchange of expressions for similar facilities.

So that with Open Office the nomenclature is undecipherable unless you
are familiar with Perl and other scripts.

With M$ Office you just put a: ^ sign in front of the initial of the
expression you want to change or remove.

Thus to arrange a set of data separated by variable numbers of spaces
you just replace a load of spaces with one or two. And then replace
them with:

^p for paragraphs or:
^t for tabs.

With the data set out in tabs it will copy and paste straight into any
spread sheet.