Regular expression functions in Excel

smokefoot

It’s interesting to see the give and take between google sheets and excel. Google sheets came on the scene shooting for total backwards compatibility and then proceeded to develop some really interesting innovations. Now we see new features emerging on both sides that are quickly replicated by the other player. Notably off the top of my mind:

* spill formulas - google first, now supported in MSFT

* # notation - MSFT enhancement to spill formulas not yet adopted in google

* regular expressions - google first, now in Excel

* check boxes - google first, now supported in excel

There must be others. I would expect competitive dynamics where each side tries to build extensions that can’t be replicated on the other side

underlines

Coincidentally using the same function names as Google sheets did for years. :D

aronhegedus

huh, TIL that regex wasn't a thing in vanilla excel. Thought that'd be a basic thing that's included.

personalityson

The reason is MS is gradually deprecating VBScript. Today it's the VBScript.RegExp reference that is being used in VBA.

eviks

Could we get some easy aliasing of REGEXREPLACE to reRepl and picking a regex engine that matches the syntax rules you're used to in a the next decade or so?

> Try asking Bing Copilot for regex patterns!

Or maybe embed a cheaper and more reliable solution like https://regex101.com?

smartmic

Any information on which standard they have implemented (POSIX BRE, ERE, PCRE, ...)? Since they are Microsoft, I would not be surprised if there is none.

tezza

At last the production reliability of Excel meets the clarity of regular expressions and the simplicity of matrix slices

intended

Good gravy.

Things im terrified of:

- making an error in a financial model - checking a model - making an error in a regexes - checking a regex

Thins I love; - dumb excel stuff

This is a great time to be alive, and at arms length from finance.

To all the people who will deal with the fallout- I salute you.

This is awesome.

jeisc

never too late to do something that should have been since day one

jupin

Finally, an excel formula I will actually remember

leshenka

truly amazing times: Excel gets regex support (search-in-selected-cells is not available though, as well as search by regex)

6c696e7578

LibreOffice has had regex for donkeys years.

against_entropy

Hope the office copilot can do this for me

nickpeterson

Does excel have gpu accelerated calculations, seems an obvious thing to add if not?

marcus0x62

What's the joke for this - now you have three problems?

louthy

Now you’ve got two problems

mindaslab

Use Libre Office if you value your freedom.

blitzar

Yet another meta breaker - this is another move aimed at the casual audience to bring in the party gamers and make the program an absolute mess competitively.

curiousgal

No lookahead/lookbehind? Boo

stockhorn

Now I can finally parse (X)HTML with Excel ;)

JoeyBananas

Congrats on catching up to Perl! Maybe it took so long because Bill was on vacation on Epstein island.

Shorel

I am waiting for the day I can use Excel as a REST API client, so I write the ID of some record in a cell, and Excel does all the work of calling the API repeatedly and fills the rows and sheets with the required information.

This will kill a few Python jobs and make it a very popular REST client =)

neallindsay

Kudos using "regex" instead of "regexp", as it is much nicer to say out loud.

zorrn

Am I the only one who distrusts domains with numbers in it?

GregoireDev

I am confused between all these AI announcements from Microsoft and the exciting new regex support in "preview" (aka soon to be dropped)