I was fortunate to learn some bits of regex/grep from helpful people on this 
list who not only showed an answer to a question but explained what was 
happening. While this search/replace using grep is quite simple, it’s not 
always obvious to everyone.


> On May 8, 2022, at 1:36 PM, Dave Simpson <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> You want to do a GREP search, with search string like this:
> 
> ^(2 PLAC)(.*)$
> 
> And you want to replace with this:
> 
> \1\2 England
> 
> That’s it. Try it.
> 

In the search pattern:
^ means start at the beginning of a line
(2 PLAC) parentheses bracket the search text and “remembers" it. In this case, 
it is known characters. Grep lets you search for unknown/partially known 
characters too.
(.*) second parentheses uses “.” As any character except newline or carriage 
return. The asterisk expands that to zero or more characters.
$ means the end of the line.

The replacement is
\1 first parentheses “remembered” pattern
\2 follow that with the second
 England end the replacement with a space and then the literal text “England”

That’s mostly this grep/replace. You know the BBEdit Manual has lots more.
Bucky

-- 
This is the BBEdit Talk public discussion group. If you have a feature request 
or need technical support, please email "[email protected]" rather than 
posting here. Follow @bbedit on Twitter: <https://twitter.com/bbedit>
--- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"BBEdit Talk" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to [email protected].
To view this discussion on the web visit 
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bbedit/C5EDBB44-1344-45DA-B901-F489E9358C0E%40gmail.com.

Reply via email to