RE: Use of regular expression

Hi, Rick:

To search for the word rick anywhere with a string, your exact regular
expression would be (are you ready for this complexity?) 'rick'. That will
find the string 'rick' anywhere within the search field.

This is exactly the same as your r{1}i{1}... syntax, and _so_ much more
legible. While the SQL suggestion is an option, it is likely to add to your
run time. But (like all performance topics) it depends on what else is
happening in your code.

Dennis Lovelady
http://www.linkedin.com/in/dennislovelady
--
"I'd like to thank my parents and my mother and father."
-- golfer Greg Norman, accepting an award

I'm wondering if using regular expressions is a good way to handle a
word search. What I need is an exact match of a series of characters,
say 'rick', in a character field. I have only used regular expressions
a couple of times and the syntax still gets me confused. I think I see
a way to do this with with something like r{1}i{1}c{1}k{1}.

I know I can do this with the %SCAN op code. The reason I'm thinking
about using regular expressions is the search will be over a table of
close to 1 billion records and I'm looking for efficiencies any place I
can find them. If an expression can be created I want to do some
comparisons between using a regular expression and %SCAN to see which
is really the best performer.