Hi, what are the tools available from easier text extraction? The input is unstructured text, but I want to extract portion from it. I am not looking for an engineered approach (writing a parser or something), but something that can be done quickly by hand (i.e. interactively). For example I have string str = ' Temperature 0 37C (98F) [0x25] (TMPIN0)' Now I want to extract '0x25' from it and convert it into integer In Ruby it is dead simple: str[/\[(.*)\]/,1].hex # "=> 37" , or .to_i(16) In Pharo I have to break my fingers first: rx := '.*\[0x(.*)\].*' asRegex. rx matches: str. Integer readFrom: (rx subexpression: 2) base: 16 "=>37". * I have to know that to get subexpression I have to match first to manipulate the internal state * I have to store the matcher to access the subexpression * I need to explicitly use some global variable Integer as a conversion utility to convert hex to dec * I have to manually remove the 0x, even though it is a very common way of expressing hex numbers So the question is: do we have a better way to do these things? And as I've mentioned - the use case is interactive coding where you often throw the code away when you are done; so dead easy to write and use. Thanks, Peter