VBA Regex
I’ve come to love regular expressions. Not only do they make me feel geeky and cool (like when I can turn up my nose and say “Well, I just use vi”), but they’re damn powerful. So, as I was looking for a way to make an EndNote-style importer for CIRRIE, it seemed like the obvious choice. The problem was that there just didn’t seem to be any information on the internet about exactly how I was to go about this.
I came across RegExpr from AiVosto, but it’s not free. I understand that not everything on the internet is free (though it’d be nice), but I’m already trying to totally redo our entire importing/indexing/database system and so asking for $100 with only my reassuring smile and insistence that “it’s better” probably wouldn’t help.
Then, on my third or so trip into Google to find something — anything — to help, I stumbled on an article by Mark Carter: basically, to get regex to work in VBA you have to flip a switch. That’s it. Poof, free regex support.
(and of course, you just have to link to xkcd at this point)