Regexs within text editors
Overview
Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 0 minQuestions
How can we invoke regular expressions within certain text editors?
Objectives
Introduce regex substitutions implemented in text editors, e.g. Nano, VSCode
Regular expressions, for both searching and substituting, with all the capabilities we’ve looked at today, are fully implemented in many modern text editors.
For example, on Windows: Visual Studio Code, Notepad++, Sublime Text…
Patterns follow all the same syntax you’ve learnt using grep and sed. However, you’ll usually find that the following patterns work that didn’t work with Grep:
| Written as | Equivalent to |
|---|---|
| \d | [0-9] A digit |
| \D | [^0-9] Not a digit |
| \t | A tab character |
| \n | A newline, if program supports multi-line matching |
In Nano, find and replace options are listed at the bottom of the screen as ^W Where Is and
^\ Replace respectively, which in Windows corresponds to Ctrl+W for Find or Ctrl+\
for Replace.
Once either is enabled a new option for toggling Regex mode on or off is listed at the
bottom: M-R Reg.exp.. This command (Meta+R) corresponds to Alt+R on Windows.
Toggling Regex mode on will change the prompt from Search: to Search [Regexp]:.
With Regex mode on, all the same syntax from grep and sed should work, including using \1, \2, etc. to
reference groups captured by round brackets when doing a replace.
Key Points
Regular expression capabilities are incorporated in most modern text editors for find and replace.