In reply to Ksharp. To me it is always choice between 1) code length, 2) run time, and 3) code clarity. In my current projects I am dealing with rather large data, therefore program efficiency (run time) is a paramount. For this particular example, code length is not much different: transtrn(STR,'
',trimn('')) vs. prxchange('s/<.+?>//',-1,str) However, processing time for the first code snippet is considerably less. Besides, code clarity and repeatability is better. Having said that, for some string processing tasks (e.g. data validation) using regular expressions can produce more robust solutions.