Marco on 16 Jul 2015 14:17:27
We think regexp support will help the adoption of the Power Query tool in the most demanding use cases. Many thanks.
- Comments (79)
- Merged Idea (2)
RE: Regular Expressions support in Power Query
to me, Power Query makes one of the few differences to the Libre-/Openoffice ecosystem. Looking into it I was startled to find no regex support. Has this been forgotten or is there a fear of "overcomplicating" M for newbies? I only hope, implementation of regexes would not blow the architecture of the M interpreter.Cheers - Joe //
RE: Regular Expressions support in Power Query
It is released to Excel 365 Insider also. High time, it should be rolled out to PQ as well.
RE: Regular Expressions support in Power Query
Supporting regular expressions in M code, would make cleaning data so much more efficient and flexible. M code has some good inbuilt functionality to clean and trim code, but native Regular expressions would allow things to be done succinctly in one step instead of many. Plus, regular expressions are already well known to us who have used other languages such as SQL, Perl, JavaScript, Python, R etc.This is my biggest bugbear with M code.
RE: Regular Expressions support in Power Query
Supporting PCRE2 would be a huge improvement of Power Query M capabilities.
RE: Regular Expressions support in Power Query
Regular expressions should be supported in Power Query, and generally in Dataflows in Data Factory part of Fabric. Regular expressions is defacto standard and open standard for string transformation. Data Factory is presented as transformation workload, but does not support any advanced text transformation function (except some simple excel-like function). Currently Data Factory is not possible use for transforming text data.
RE: Regular Expressions support in Power Query
Regular expressions should be supported in Power Query without resorting to hacks or external scripting tools.For starters, the developers behind Power BI/Power Query can implement a regular expression algorithm as described in the following link (NFA-based): https://deniskyashif.com/2019/02/17/implementing-a-regular-expression-engine/As Power Query currently stands, it is very limited in parsing text files, especially those not formatted with CSV, JSON, XML and simple character delimiters (spaces, tabs, colons, etc).
RE: Regular Expressions support in Power Query
I am surprised why this doesn't have enough votes yet!
RE: Regular Expressions support in Power Query
Having RegEx capability is essential for being able to extract/manipulate text efficiently. And available in public libraries so not a huge ask but massive capability increase for text handling
RE: Regular Expressions support in Power Query
Please make full RegEx support in Power Query. The current way of using it through (Web.Page function) performs very slow and does not support full regex functionality.
RE: Regular Expressions support in Power Query
Only 900+ upvotes in 8 years? Let's all take a moment to consider how many potential users took note of the lack of regexp and dropped the tool as a truly scalable option for SMBs.