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by aronhegedus 748 days ago
huh, TIL that regex wasn't a thing in vanilla excel. Thought that'd be a basic thing that's included.
3 comments

I realized that long ago... it's incredible that it took this long given how common it is in programming.
The strategy of freezing VBA and BAT scripting, offering better alternatives, and hoping they'd go away on their own hasn't worked.
You can using VBA functions and VBScript.RegExp. This is restricted to Windows though. Microsoft wants to get rid of VBScript, so maybe they are going through the most common use cases in Excel.
Have they officially said they want to get rid of VBScript?
Yes, but that doesn't include getting rid of VBA. They probably do want to do that though, to allow mobile apps and web-based Excel to run interactive sheets using Javascript. Of course they've been trying for years to allow Javascript in Excel, but at least in the first versions that ran using Internet Explorer in the background. I'm not sure if that has evolved further now.
You never expect basic ergonomics from an ALL CAPS language. They all suck.