This is a common issue. We have a file which was printed for human consumption. Consequently, it has many different kinds of lines.

These are the two kinds of lines of interest:

900296268 4/9/16 Mobility, Data Mining and Privacy Expired

900295204 4/1/16 Pro .NET Best Practices …

Actual quote:

"they spend a lot of time maintaining regular expressions. So, what are the alternatives to regular expression hell?"

Regular Expression Hell? It's a thing?

I have several thoughts:

1. Do you have metrics to support "a lot"? I doubt it. It's very difficult to tease RE maintenance away from …

The users want to locate people by last name. They want flexible matching. That's not very hard.

The DBA wants to do some wild-card searches efficiently. The DBA may not be responding to the users actual request, making this more complex than it needs to be.

I'm not in contact …