When we came up with the idea of starting a blog for localization professionals and everyone else interested, with an intent of ignoring the marketing and purely business-related aspects, the array of relevant topics still appeared to be overwhelming. With all the pruning and grafting, we still feel like Winnie-the-Pooh, with a hand in every honeypot. If you don’t have a knack for the overly technical, don’t worry, we are not married to our gadgetry. You will find plenty of content on more strategic and philosophical concepts.
One of the first topics that came to our minds was a method that scarcely leaves people indifferent. You either get heart palpitations and assume a defensive position, or find it the best sandbox play buddy there is.
The score is called regular expressions, which have penetrated the development sector by virtue of its flexibility and processing power. The actual implementation varies by engine, from the well-renowned Notepad++, built on the Scintilla editing component through the .NET environment (in particular, used by memoQ) to designated regex tools, such as RegexBuddy or PowerGrep. Fortunately, however, most of them nowadays support more or less the syntax version originating from Perl and dominating most of today’s programming languages and editors.
In the upcoming posts, regular expressions will be our recurrent visitors, as we rely on their features heavily in language engineering. The beauty of regular expressions is that they can be applied in many stages of a workflow, and provide reliable automation and scripting solutions for customizing individual client workflows. The processing aspect gives us the edge when it comes to text manipulation, conversion and interoperability, but it can also serve as a phenomenal structural QA tool.
While the article on Wikipedia can give you a good insight if you are new to the idea, this blog will dissect the particulars by showing you actual applications and methods. But first, let us move on to something only a bit different: automation through API.