![]() Saving Patterns in Searches Character Typed (ba)*t will match t, bat, babat, but not bt Same as above, but treats the characters within the parenthesis as a group ( pattern ) one of the above special characters Represents either of the patterns specified (or)īa|t matches ba or t but not bat (it will match ba and then t for two matches instead of one) Represents 1 or more of the previous character Represents 0 or more of the previous characterīa*t matches bt, bat, baat, etc. ![]() Represents 0 or 1 of the previous character Representing Multiple Character Patterns in Searches Character Typed Represents any character except the ones specified after the ^ Represents any characters within the range of characters specified Represents any of the characters inside the brackets Represents a character that is normally a special character Matches any non word character (anything not matched by \w) Word characters in the ASCII range are generally alphanumeric, and characters whose value is greater than 127 are also considered word characters." Typically this is letters, numbers, and underscores, but also includes some other characters you might not cosinder word characters. According to the release notes: "A word is any run of non-word-break characters bounded by word breaks. Matches any non whitespace character (anything not matched by \s) Matches any whitespace character (space, tab, line break, newline, form feed) Will match anything except 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9 (anything not matched by \d) Note: Only present in BBEdit Pro 5.1 and Lite 4.6 or greater Represents the character typed, with the exception of the special characters defined below Characters to Use in Replacement PatternsĬharacters to Use in Search Patterns Character Typed.Representing Multiple Character Patterns in Searches.BBEdit discusses how to use grep in the Apple Guide (and in the manual), but it may be a little short of an explanation for those unfamilar with it, so here's my explanation. If you don't know how to use it, it's time you learned, because it is immensely useful. The version of grep that is used in BBEdit is a very basic version, similar to UNIX's egrep. Grep is perhaps one of the most powerful and least understood features of BBEdit. But the manual wants to make sure that long-time customers (I believe it was on Version 4 when I first bought it) don’t get confused by changes in behavior, even when those changes occurred nearly two decades ago.BBEdit Grep Tutorial BBEdit Grep Tutorial As I was looking up the notation for named groups in the BBEdit manual, I ran across this note:īBEdit is currently on Version 12.5 Version 6.5 came out in 2001. When a well-documented app has such a long history, the manual starts to accumulate delightful callbacks to the olden days. My general feeling is that if the pattern is so complicated I have to use variables to keep track of all the groups, I should stop and break the problem down into smaller parts.īy the way, you may have heard that BBEdit is celebrating its 25th anniversary of not sucking. I don’t think I’ve ever used a named group in any situation, whether the regex was in a text editor or a script. Here’s how that would have looked, using var as the pattern name: So after undoing the replacement, I changed the pattern to this, ![]() ![]() In other words, if I had been trying to change a10, v10, and x10 to az, vz, and xz, a replacement pattern of \1z would have been just fine, because the trailing z means there’s no way to misinterpret the intent of the \1 in that pattern. But in most cases, we can use \1 through \9 instead of \01 through \09 because there’s no ambiguity. You see, BBEdit can capture up to 99 groups in the search pattern and, strictly speaking, we should use two-digit numbers when referring to them in the replacement pattern. Since captured group 13 was blank, all my variable names were replaced with 0. Had I done so, I would have seen that BBEdit was interpreting my replacement pattern as “Captured group 13, followed by 0” instead of “Captured group 1, followed by 30,” which was what I intended. But I wasn’t clever enough to notice the blue coloring in the replacement pattern. And because I think I’m clever, I didn’t want to do three non-regex replacements, one each for a10, v10, and x10. I couldn’t just replace 10 with 30 because there were instances of 10 in the code that weren’t related to the variables. I brought up BBEdit’s Find window and entered this: The variables were named a10, v10, and x10, and I wanted to change them to a30, v30, and x30, respectively. I thought it would be a simple regex find/replace, and it was. Next post Previous post Regex groups and numeralsĪ week or so ago, I was editing a program and decided I should change some variable names.
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