Understanding VBScript: Using Regular Expressions

Searching and Modifying Text
Regular expressions are handy for searching and modifying text. For example, suppose you have text that contains URLs expressed in the short form without the protocol signature (e.g., www.expoware.com instead of http://www.expoware.com) and you want to automatically insert the http:// prefix in all of them. The text you're searching is If you comply with regular expression, go to www.regexp.com or www.re.com, so to trap all the URLs, you can set the pattern

regexp.Pattern = "www.\w+\.\w+"

The www.\w+\.\w+ pattern traps all the substrings that start with the www. expression and are followed by two dot-separated words. (This example doesn't consider URLs with more dots, such as www.xxx.co.uk. I'll discuss these URLs next month.)

At this point, you might be tempted to use the Replace method to add the http:// prefix. However, this method won't work. Although the Replace method would correctly find all the matching strings, it would replace them with the same constant string (i.e., the same URL). Instead, you need to modify, not replace, each matching string. To modify text, you use RegExp's Execute method. . . .