RegEx.DLL provides some much needed regular-expression handling for VB programmers. The 'clsRegEx' class implements all the common UNIX wildcard characters allowing sophisticated string comparisons and search-and-replace operations to be performed.
* The '*' character represents zero or more occurrences of the previous character in the expression:
ab*c matches ac, abc, abbc, abbbbbbbc ...
* The '+' character represents one or more occurrences of the previous character in the expression:
ab+c matches abc, abbc, abbbbbbbc but not ac
* Numbers within curly brackets represent a specific number of occurrences of the previous character:
a{3} matches aaa a{3,5} matches aaa, aaaa and aaaaa
* The '?' character represents zero or one occurrences of the previous character:
a?c matches ac and aac
* The '.' character represents any single character:
a.c matches abc, aXc but not ac or abbc
Round brackets can be used to apply multipliers, such as '*' or '+', to groups of characters:
* (abc)* matches an empty string, abc, abcabc, abcabcabc ...
* (abc)+ matches abc, abcabc, abcabcabc ...
Square brackets can be used to specify possible values for a single character. A hyphen can be used in this context to represent a range of characters. If the first character within the brackets is a '^' then the range is exclusive rather than inclusive (ie. the expression matches any single character not shown):
* a[bB]c matches abc and aBc
* a[^0-9]c matches abc and aXc but not a0c ... a9c
A '' symbol negates the special meaning of the following character. Only valid if it precedes one of *+?{([])}.
* a*c matches a*c
* a[[]]c matches a]c and a[c
* a\c matches ac
* abc is not a valid expression
The download includes VB code samples demonstrating how to use the library.
This library is still in beta test - it works well for short expressions, but due to the recursive nature of the code longer strings can take a while.
