EasyPatterns

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EasyPatterns™ are a nifty new way to describe patterns of text, in a way that is easy to understand and use, and with plenty of power under the hood. While one user has described them as 'regular expressions for dummies', EasyPatterns actually help you to make use of the underlying power of the perl-style regular expressions, without having to understand them (which is a BIG plus!).
EasyPatterns make parsing a US phone number as easy as :

[ PhoneNumber ]

or if you prefer the long way:

[ optional punctuation, 3 digits, punctuation, 3 digits,
punctuation, 4 digits ]

 (The equivalent perl pattern is

[[:punct:]]*[[:digit:]]{3}[[:punct:]][[:digit:]]{3}[[:punct:]][[:digit:]]{4}

)

Once you've found a phone number, it's easy to re-arrange it or reformat it.

Using this pattern:

[ optional punctuation, capture(3 digits), punctuation,
capture(3 digits), punctuation, capture(4 digits) ]

 ...we could re-arrange phone numbers like this:

$1.$2.$3
($1) $2-$3
+1.$1.$2.$3

How easy is that!

You can easily control the quantity of text you match, and include literal text like this:

[ 1 or more digits, '.', 2 digits ]
$[ 2+ digits, '.', 2 digits ]
USD [ 3 to 6 digits ].00

You can easily match dates like this:

[ Day <-/ > Month <-/ > Year ]
[ Month <-/ > Day <-/ > Year ]
[ Year <-/ > Month <-/ > Day ]

('Month' matches both numbers 1-12, and short and long month names)

EasyPatterns are SO good, we've included them in TextPipe. Other vendors are including it in their solutions.

Samples

Text being search for EasyPattern
A US phone number [ PhoneNumber ]
An email address [ EmailAddress ]
A time [ Hour <:.-> Minute <:.-> Second ]
A US date [ Month <-/ > Day <-/ > Year ]
An IP address [ IPAddress ]
A word starting with 'A' [ 'A', 1 or more wordChar ]

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