Find and Replace: using regular expressions

Greetings!

Is would be great to have the capability of using regular expression syntax (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression and https://docs.python.org/2.4/lib/re-syntax.html) in Find and Replace dialog.

For example, I want to convert all Date fields from «1989/2/1/» to «02.01.1989».

Using the RegEx syntax this query would be like this:

Find: ([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/([0-9]{1,2})/

Replace: \2.\3.\1

What do you think about this idea?

Thank you.

2 Likes

Something I’ve been longing and yearning for for a long time too.

1 Like

I’d like this feature too. There are sometimes problems when importing data curated by other organizations that I could fix quickly using a regular expression find and replace. In particular, sometimes the DOI field contains the DOI, the DOI embeded in the dx.doi.org URL, and bizarrely, two copies of the DOI, the second one followed by a period. Neatening these up with a regex would be super helpful, because now I have to hunt and peck through hundreds of entries.

Very very good idea !