As I mentioned in my review of ManagedQ, you can do some really interesting things with regular expressions. Roger Matus talked about IBM’s Personal Email Search tool back in December, and the core of that appears to be using REs to recognise phone numbers, email addresses and URLs in the body of messages. Skype and other companies have been working pretty intensively on phone number recognition, taking things a bit further with knowledge about possible dialing codes to help them reformat the numbers in a standard way. I won’t be taking things that far, but in the next article I’ll be showing you the expressions you need to recognize simple dates, times, phone numbers, email addresses, prices and URLs from a text document. You’ll be able to pick out all of these examples using a few simple expressions:

805 277 3606, 8052773606, 805 277-3606
pete@petewarden.com
http://foo.com , foo.com, http://www.foo.com
$10, $10.99, $10 million
10:30
June 1st, 2008, 6/1/08, 6/1/2008