VBA for text processing?

[Liberty Bell]

Can VBA be used for processing/cleanup of plain text data, and is it reasonably well suited for that? I'm currently learning VBA and don't have the time/inclination to learn Python or Perl, as programming is not my primary interest. I like the fact that VBA comes with Office, and I'd like to use that if possible.

[dflak]

VBA can work with text. It has functions like MID, LEFT, RIGHT, LEN and LIKE to match regular expressions. SPLIT comes in handy to split strings based on a delimiter. You can also program Find and Replace. It would probably be at least as difficult to program what you want to do as PERL and in some ways maybe more.

[mogul]

I had some text reports from an engineering program. I had to extract data, format data, put some data in database and produce a new report. I originally did it in VBA. I redid it in Ruby. Ruby was about 20X faster and much shorter. It also allowed me to run it on a Unix system and not burden my computer.