Folks:
In the new-metadata releases (will go to alpha today or tomorrow), I am considering implementing the following, chosen via a combo box.
1) Text mode -- case sensitive. Simple text search and replace.
2) Text mode -- case insensitive.
3) Regexp basic -- as today. Source and destination are the same. Search_string is applied to source, matches are replaced with replace_string then processed by function.
4) Regexp advanced. Source is a template, similar to the save-as templates. The source string is built from the template. Destination is explicitly specified, and must be a single field. For the destination, a combo box will offer the choices of 'replace', 'prepend', or 'append'. The search_string will be applied to the template. Matches will be replaced with replace_string and processed by function. When all matches are finished, the result will be saved to the destination according to the 'replace' etc specification.
The advanced form can be used to copy values between fields with some processing on the way, construct composite fields, combine fields, and many other variations. I think this covers all the requests to date.
I know it is hard to make comments without an implementation, but if you have any, speak now.
