[OneWingedShark]

>Grep (which handles Regex) in the right hands is a very powerful tool for manipulating text data. I won't argue against that; I've heard some amazing things done with it... but in my own experience the regex in use is always breaking/broken. I'm slightly more inclined to learn SNOBOL rather than gain a [working-]mastery of regex as 1) it will be another [programming] language to learn, and 2) it seems, just from an overview, to be more *useful* for pattern-matching. (And, as a plus, apparently it's been ported over to GNAT's Ada compiler as a compiler-specific package.)

[Texas Fossil]

I have used Regex with editors, Grep and Gnumeric (spreadsheet).

Regex syntax is not the same in all apps. Documentation is pretty sketchy on most apps concerning the use of Regex.

You never work on data that cannot be recovered.

It is amazing how fast Grep can strip patterns from text data. Huge file of text data in seconds or a few minutes.

I love command line apps for their efficiency. At one time I maintained about 80,000 images (& thumbnails). When the company I worked for then went to the web with their catalog I created all the images for the web from the print type images using Image Magick. I entered the command to create the images and simply went home for the evening. I do not know what time it finished the batch, but it was not even half the night.

As I added images I would batch process the new images and create the thumbnails using Image Magick. It would take only seconds to process several hundred images at a time. And the quality was great.