“This…shitty function……”
Inoue continued to stomp on the REGEXREPLACE for a while. I felt bad for it because it was so quiet. Wasn’t it the fault of the user who created the formula that caused the error and then left it as it was? It’s pathetic. Inoue had so much praise for the REGEX function just the day before. The hardest thing about being a worker was needing to literally fight with your favourite functions. I had also realised this when I was attacked by SUMIFS.
“Inoue-san, are you okay?”
“Ye…yeah, sorry for getting upset. There are still two EXTRACTS left.”
“Yes, since they don’t move, I think it’s okay to leave them alone. What do you think?”
“Well, it would be a problem if there were some normal functions that needed to be processed hidden behind them, so let’s go take a look.”
We decided to return to the two remaining functions. I asked as we walked over.
“By the way, what was the cause of the errors?”
“Oh, right. I forgot to explain. The REGEX functions are string functions that match regular expressions, but they don’t support all regular expressions that are commonly used in programming. The ones we just dealt with was a lookbehind match. For example, if you wanted to match the string after ‘Hills’ for the address ‘Tokyo Minato Ward Roppongi 6-Chome 10-1 Roppongi Hills Mori Tower’, you could express it as (?<=Hills). This is useful in many situations, such as extracting the last part of a prefecture or the part before the domain of an email address. But, unfortunately, it is currently not supported by the REGEX functions.”
“I see. Thank you very much.”
It almost seemed like Inoue had been lying about how angry she had been just before. Deep knowledge on regular expressions came out easily. While we were talking, we arrived back near the entrance, so I could see the faint red glow of the REGEXEXTRACT’s from this distance.
“Can you see anything?”
“No, it looks fine……pretend I didn’t say anything.”
A function the size of the palm of our hand, or rather, a function that resembled the palm of a hand, was crawling around the base of one of the EXTRACT’s. It was an Addams Family hand, VLOOKUP.
“I wonder for what reason this user is creating this sheet for. I heard it’s for science students to practice regular expressions.”
“Someones there are people who use Google Spreadsheets as a free notebook. They don’t generate very complicated functions or huge amounts of data, but unusual functions tend to show up.”
I see, now that she mentioned it, it was true that I always had Excel on my desktop for small data processing without any particular goal in mind.
“It’s a pain, but let’s make the EXTRACT quiet down and then deal with it. The same plan as before will be fine.”
I nodded and was about to stand in front of the EXTRACT when VLOOKUP rustled out and jumped towards my branch shears. It’s on. I put my hands on the VLOOKUP and processed it.
“I’ll deal with it. VLOOKUP!”
A few seconds passed, but there was no reaction. When I removed my hand, I noticed that VLOOKUP’s fingernails were red, as if they had been painted with nail polish. It was already gross enough, so what was going on?
“Inoue-san, this is……?”
“It’s also an error……”
Before I had become a worker, I had also made a lot of errors, so I couldn’t complain. However, I would like to be given a break. Since VLOOKUP was just a hand, there was no danger like the REGEX functions. Annoyed that it was still there, I shook the handles of the shears with a flick.
“IYAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!”
The VLOOKUP wasn’t able to hold on and flew away. However, it landed on the wrong place. After drawing a parabola, it somehow landed on Inoue’s chest, or rather, her breasts. Why did VLOOKUP’s and Inoue always end up like this? Honestly, I was a little jealous.
“I-I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that. No, I mean I didn’t mean to send it flying there…”
I almost gave and excuse that made me sound like a lucky pervert and was at a loss for words.
“I won’t forgive you…I won’t forgive you…I’ll make you take responsibility.”
Inoue grabbed the VLOOKUP by the wrist and pulled it from her chest. Spreading its palm wide open, she pressed it to the ground. She then held the blade of her machete against the little finger of the VLOOKUP. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.
“Inoue-san, that’s a bit……”
“Hah?”
What should I do? I didn’t want to see such a bizarre scene. But, there was nothing I could do.
Just as Inoue swung her machete, the VLOOKUP disappeared. The surrounding REGEX functions also disappeared at the same time.
“Did they run away?”
It seemed like the user had deleted the errorred functions. Thus, the second day’s quests with Saito ended.
Author’s Notes.
Regular expressions in Google Spreadsheets comply with the specifications of Google’s regular expression engine, re2. Please check the following document for details.
https://github.com/google/re2/blob/master/doc/syntax.txt