A Regular Expression Is A Healthy Expression
Paul T. Shannon · 2009
Data collection often takes the form of open-ended text fields. The pharmaceutical industry is no exception; from clinical trials to patient record data, open ended text is used to record information considered relevant. Dosages, event dates or even patient identifying data could be written as free text. The principle of regular expressions as a tool for mining this data for various types of characters and/or combinations of text exists in many programming languages. SAS has supported regular expressions since v6.12, with v9 seeing considerable enhancements. Languages such as Java and Visual Basic, each support their own take on regular expression technology to provide programmers with a powerful tool for mining text or string data based on patterns of text, rather than fixed characters. As a result, regular expressions have a very wide scope to solve many different problems in a range of programming environments.