My posting apparently didn't through first time because of an e-mail address confusion:

On 25 Jan 2013, at 19:14, Bruce Button wrote:

> This is a typical candidate for regular expression searching

Depending on how unsanitary the other text before and after the date might be, I think I'd be inclined to export the field of interest as a text file (single field, tab-text format seems best), then do some regular expression stuff with BBEdit or TextWrangler (free and nearly as good for many purposes). Both come with a great tutorial on GREP search & replace. Once the find-replace stuff has been done, re-import the extracted dates into a new field in the existing set of records.

In some cases I've also found it useful to combine GREP searches with AppleScript when I had many files that needed similar processing. I have loved FileMaker since the days of Nashoba but sometimes other tools work better for certain jobs!

in friendship

Rowland

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