Can non-IT people learn and take advantage of regular expressions? [closed]

Posted by user1598390 on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by user1598390
Published on 2012-10-20T05:44:11Z Indexed on 2012/10/20 11:19 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 346

Filed under:

data

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non-programmers

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text-processing

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regular-expressions

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end-users

Often times, not-IT people has to deal with massive text data, clean it, filter it, modify it. Often times normal office tools like Excel lack the tools to make complex search and replace operations on text.

Could this people benefit from regexps ?

Can regexp be taught to them ?

Are regular expressions the exclusive domain of programmers and unix/linux technicians ?

Can they be learned by non-IT people, given regexps are not a programming language?

Is this a valid or achievable goal to make some users regexp-literate through appopriate training ?

Have you have any experiences on this issue? and if so, have it been successful ?

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