Too Much Information? Regex to the Rescue Featured
I recently had a project where the architect had done a very thorough job – all doors were clearly labeled, and each label included information about the corresponding room. As a result, every label was unique. There was more information than usual.
The project reached the contractor. From their perspective, there was simply too much information. What they actually needed was just a way to quickly count how many doors had to be ordered.
This is where Simplebim and its Copy Property function helped. On the last line of the dialogue box, there is a feature – Regular expression (regex). As someone from the construction field, this was initially unfamiliar to me, but it has turned out to be very useful for handling large amounts of data.
In simple terms, it works like a rule or pattern that helps you find a specific part of a text – for example, “take everything after this symbol” or “skip this part”. It can seem quite technical, and a typical user doesn’t need to fully understand how it works. In this AI age, it’s enough to know that it allows you to precisely control and split text.
And this is where our new “friend”, ChatGPT, came in. I gave it a short description of which part of the text I needed to copy, and it provided a suitable regex.
The result? The contractor quickly got exactly the information they needed, and the architect could continue focusing on their core work.
Comments
3 comments
Yeah, ChatGPT is pretty good at crafting regular expressions. Once you’ve got the regex sorted out, this is a good site to test it: regex101: build, test, and debug regex
Yes, regex is really powerful and before we had the likes of ChatGPT it was pretty much just for the few and selected. But now it is so much easier. My own approach to using ChatGPT for creating the correct regex is to describe briefly which part of the full text I need, but not down to the last detail. Then I copy&paste some sample values and for each sample value the part I want to keep. Like this:
…maybe we should one day build this into Simplebim so you could give the prompt from inside Simplebim and test automatically with data from the current model…
Yes, REGEX – even with the old templates – I cover it in 15 minutes during training sessions, and everyone gets the basics, which is all you need for our construction industry.
It’s incredibly powerful yet so little known – well, at least when people aren’t familiar with Simplebim+Regex 😏
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