Earlier quoted context omitted.
Python or Ruby is fine...the main trick is to be able to process those fields with regular expressions...which, IIRC, requires throwing in VBscript if you were to handle it solely in Excel. Python and Ruby would also allow for more elegant-looking -- i.e. more maintainable -- functions to handle that field.
R is fine too: it has regular expressions and probably excels if you plan to do statistics using all of that data. Python seems to have reasonable statistics functionality as well (with pandas, etc) but I haven't used it personally.
Thanks for the note. I've not really looked into how one would do that with R (doing it in Python seems more clear), but am checking it out now. If anyone else is looking I'm finding this PDF helpful: http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/wiki/pub/Main/SvetlanaEdenR...