Not long ago I heard about regular expressions for the first time. I believe it is something invented in the UNIX world a long time ago. One of my colleagues showed me an example and I found it to be of very little use. However recently I finally saw the light meaning I found something useful to do with it.

So what is a regular expression and where can you use it. It can be used in FIND/EXCLUDE/CHANGE in ISPF EDIT/VIEW and a regular expression is a sophisticated form of a picture string which you hopefully are familiar with. All the possibilities are described in ISPF Edit and Edit Macros, and to make it work C runtime services must be available which I believe they are at almost all installations.

I have found regular expressions extremely useful when I want to search for two adjacent words with one or more spaces as separators. For instance searching for EXEC SQL or EXEC CICS in a program without being sure if there is only one space in between. In this case I can use the command FIND R'EXEC +SQL' or FIND R'EXEC +CICS'. The search is performed without any regards to small/capital letters. By using RC'regular expression' the case of letters is considered. Another smart feature is to search for two differents words in one go using FIND R'SQL|CICS', and please remark that you need to use the vertical bar and not an exclamation mark (!). I hope regular expressions will enable you to make searches you have always dreamt about, but could not perform using existing methods.