EasyPattern Engine COM DLL provides a cool new way to describe text patterns. They're English-like, powerful and easy to understand. EasyPatterns make parsing a US phone number as easy as

[ PhoneNumber ]

or if you prefer the long way:

[ optional punctuation, 3 digits, punctuation, 3 digits, punctuation, 4 digits ]

Once found it's easy to re-arrange it or reformat it. Using this pattern:

[ optional punctuation, capture(3 digits), punctuation, capture(3 digits), punctuation, capture(4 digits) ]

...we could re-arrange phone numbers like this:
$1.$2.$3
($1) $2-$3
+1.$1.$2.$3

How easy is that!

You can easily control the quantity of text you match, and include literal text like this:

[ 1 or more digits, '.', 2 digits ]
$[ 2+ digits, '.', 2 digits ]
USD [ 3 to 6 digits ].00

You can easily match dates like this:

[ Day <-/ > Month <-/ > Year ]
[ Month <-/ > Day <-/ > Year ]
[ Year <-/ > Month <-/ > Day ]

('Month' matches numbers 1-12, and short and long month names)

EasyPatterns are included in TextPipe Pro - the world's fastest multi-search and replace tool.