Native support for Regular Expressions (Regex)

chris_yates
chris_yates
in 2D Drafting

This is a wishlist item for Regex support in FIND/ REPLACE and in the API.

A Regex is a sequence of characters that specifies a match pattern in text. It is a much more powerful language than simple wildcards.

For example, "\d?\d\//\d?\d//\d\d\d\d" could represent any date in the backslash format with or without zero-padding. This could include such examples as 1/3/2026 or 29/05/2025.

At the moment, regular expressions can be accessed via the VBScript regex library. This is not good for several reasons:

  1. Regexes can only be accessed via the API
  2. The implementation in the API requires setting a VBS object, etc. This is quite unintuitive for newbie coders.
  3. VBScript is up for deprecation by Microsoft next year
  4. VBScript isn't native to non-Windows platforms

So… pretty please… can we have native support for Regexes