On Thu, May 14, 2020 at 08:00:38AM -0500, Tim Chase wrote:
On 2020-05-13 22:38, boB Stepp wrote:
I am relatively new to using regex pattern matching techniques to
search for and replace text. Today I have been trying to get a
better mastery of these techniques. But I am currently stumped on
the following text search and replace:
# Home address fields:
# field address STANDARD FIELD -- CANNOT EDIT!
# field address2 STANDARD FIELD -- CANNOT EDIT!
pobox = "PO Box", string
So based on my reading of your description & regex, you want this to
become
field pobox
rather than
# field pobox
(with the leading hash+space)?
In the above I want to change the lines starting with "pobox" to
match the format of the line above it, e.g., "field pobox", "field
work_pobox" and "field other_pobox", respectively. My best effort
so far to do this is:
:g/\(field [[:alnum:]_]*\)address2/+s/pobox/\1pobox/
I'd go with something like
:%s/\(\<field \+\w*\)address2.*\n\s*\zs\zepobox\>/\1
which captures the "field" and optional prefix, then sets the start &
end of the match with \zs and \ze so that the replacement-capture
gets inserted there.
Thank you, this works. I had to look up some of the flags you used before
I understood what you are doing. In my particular example I found I did
not need to use "\+", "\<" and "\>" to get the desired result. But I suspect
that you are using
these to protect against scenarios I am not considering. Would you mind
elaborating on why you included those additional flags?
As I am trying to understand the "why"s of all of this, it would be helpful
for my understanding if someone would explain why my regex did not work as
expected. I am still not seeing it.
--
Wishing you only the best,
boB Stepp
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