John, you mentioned the re module crashing for you. It's VERY particular about the syntax (code base is so old it doesn't support standard posix alias like [:word:]).
Here's an example that works:
import re.bas
reQuery ="'([a-zA-Z]+)'.+'([a-zA-Z]+)'"
re::match("You can see in the program that the vector 'JOKER' is declared as 'global'.",reQuery)
n = re::n()
for i=1 to n
print i,". ",re::$(i)
print
next i
That query let's you extract just the words between single-quotes.
AIR.