So at work I found myself repeatedly copying large chunks of data from one app into Excel, then grabbing only the column of data I wanted to fix and copying that into a third app that would allow me to use a regex for a search and replace operation, then copying the fixed data back into Excel, and from there, the whole blob back into the original app.
So, having used OpenOffice for personal use at home, I wondered if Calc could save me a step by allowing me to do the regex search/replace directly without the need of the third app. A little searching showed that it did indeed support regex's for search/replace. Awesome. So I installed OO on my work machine, only to find that it only supports a very basic form of the regex standard. None of the special grouping features described on this page (http://www.regular-expressions.info/refadv.html) are supported. This is rather surprising as more complete regex libraries are available for most major languages and I would have thought OO would have just used one of them rather than implementing their own regex engine.
Are there any plans to improve the regex support in OO? Specifically, I'd like to use lookahead and lookbehind groups:
(?<=...) / (?=...)