Difference between revisions of "Regular Expressions"

Revision as of 08:29, 23 January 2006

This page exists as a resource for regular expressions frequently used in EditPlus. In order to learn more about the particulars of creating a regular expression in EditPlus, see regular expression syntax.

Note: EditPlus only supports [POSIX] Regular Expressions, not [PCRE] (Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions),
which means there are no back-references, no look-aheads, no fancy quantifiers, and no convenient character
group syntax]].  Just your basic ^, $, +, *, ?, [ ], [^ ], syntax.  Also note that +/* are always greedy.

Find various forms of a word

fast(er|est)

For example: this reg. expression th(is|e|at) will find the words This, The, and That

Find a specific tag

Here is a useful regular expression for dealing with XML or HTML files - it matches an opening, closing or singular blink tag. Simply replace blink with your tag of choice.

<(/?)(blink)( [^>]*)?(/?)>

Matches:

<blink>
<blink align="center">
</blink>
<blink garbage="true"/>

Does not match:

<blinking>

<div style=

To use it in a search and replace (for instance, replace all blink tags with spans) use the following as the replace string:

<\1span\3\4>