Regular expression syntax

EditPlus supports Regular Expressions in search and replace, but its engine is not as feature-rich as others. A list of common regular expression features not available in EditPlus is available here. Please see Regular Expressions for some commonly used examples.

Operators and Syntax Supported in EditPlus

\ 

escape (\ = \\) used for matching characters that have special meaning as regular expressions

^ 

(caret) beginning of line (assertion)

$ 

end of line (assertion)

\t 

horizontal tab (0x09)

\n 

newline (0x0A or 0x0D or 0x0D+0x0A)

. 

(period) any character

( ) 

referencable grouping, see \0 - \9 below, e.g. (foo) matches "foo"

[ ] 

character class (or-list), e.g. [abc] matches "a", "b", or "c"

[^ ] 

negated character class, e.g. [^abc] matches a character that is not "a", "b", or "c"

- 

(minus sign) character range used within character class, e.g. [a-z] matches a character in the range "a" through "z"

| 

(vertical bar) logical or, e.g. (foo|bar) matches "foo" or "bar"

* 

(asterisk) match the preceding character or group zero or more times, e.g. foo* matches "fo", "foo", "fooo", etc, but not "f"

+ 

(plus-sign) match the preceding character or group one or more times, e.g. foo+ matches "foo", "fooo", etc, but not "f" or "fo"

 ? 

(question mark) match the preceding character or group zero or once only, e.g. foo? only matches "fo" and "foo"

\0 - \9 

used in "Replace with" field to represent text matched with parenthesis (\0 = whole match, \1 - \9 = submatches), no back-references

& 

When used in the "Replace with" field, the entire match is replaced. To replace with an actual ampersand, you must escape it \&

Operators and Syntax Not Supported in EditPlus

Some common regular expression syntax/operators not available in EditPlus:

foo{num} 

match foo exactly num times

foo{min, max} 

match foo at least min and at most max times, both optional

\a 

0x07, BEL

\f 

0x0C, formfeed

\r 

0x0D, carriage return, see \n

\e 

0x1B, ESC

\xfoo 

0xfoo, hexadecimal character reference

\cfoo 

control-foo

\s 

whitespace character, use [ \t\n]

\S 

non-whitespace character, use [^ \t\n]

\d 

decimal digit, use [0-9]

\D 

not a decimal digit, use [^0-9]

\w 

word character, letter, for English use [A-z]

\W 

non-word character, non-letter, for English use [^A-z]

[[:alpha:]], [[:lower:]], [[:upper:]], [[:alnum:]], [[:digit:]], [[:xdigit:]], [[:punct:]], [[:graph:]], [[:print:]], [[:blank:]], [[:space:]] 

predefined character classes (POSIX)

\b 

word boundary (assertion)

\B 

not a word boundary (assertion)

\A 

subject start (assertion), use ^

\Z 

subject end (assertion), use [\n$]

\z 

subject end (assertion), use $

assertions other than ^ and $ 

parts of patterns that are not added to matches:

(?=foo) 

positive assertion

(?!foo) 

negative assertion

(?<=foo), (?<!foo) 

look-behind assertion

(?>=foo), (?>!foo) 

look-ahead assertion, once-only sub-pattern

(?(foo)true), (?(foo)true|false) 

conditional sub-pattern, foo being either the number of a sub-pattern or an assertion

(?:foo) 

grouping, non-referencable

(?ifoo), (?mfoo), (?sfoo), (?xfoo) 

inline modifiers

(?R) 

recursive pattern

(?#foo) 

comment

Workaround

A user tool, Full RegEx Supported Replace and More has been developed that adds full regex support to EditPlus.