Plain Text is everywhere and it isn’t always present in exactly the format you would like it to be in. Take for example an address line like this one; “Pottsville, PA 17901”, that is in a single field (or xml element). The data needs to be separated into city, state, and zip code fields. Luckily there is a pattern to the address data, although the city name may vary in length and might include spaces such as in “New York”, there is always a comma and space before a two letter state abbreviation, another space and then a five digit zip code.

Now, I could write a little parsing program or perhaps use several string manipulation functions in my translator to get what I want, but I know a little something about Regular Expressions (regex). Continue reading →