Regular expression search replace in Sublime Text 2

Question

I m looking to do search replace with regular expressions in Sublime Text 2  The documentation on this is rather anemic  Specifically  I want to do a replace on groups  so something like converting this text   Hello my name is bob  And this search term   Find what  my name is   w    Replace with  my name used to be   1   The search term works just fine but I can t figure out a way to actually do a replace using the regexp group

User · Answer

Important  Use the     parentheses in your search string   While the previous answer is correct there is an important thing to emphasize  All the matched segments in your search string that you want to use in your replacement string must be enclosed by     parentheses  otherwise these matched segments won t be accessible to defined variables such as  1   2 or  1   2 etc   For example we want to replace  em  with  px  but preserve the digit values       margin  10em      Expected  margin  10px        margin  2em       Expected  margin  2px       Replacement string  margin   1px or margin   1px Search string  CORRECT   margin    0-9   em    with parentheses Search string  INCORRECT   margin   0-9  em     CORRECT CASE EXAMPLE  Using margin    0-9   em search string  with parentheses   Enclose the desired matched segment  e g   1 or  1  by     parentheses as following    Find  margin    0-9   em  with parentheses  Replace to  margin   1px or margin   1px Result        margin  10px      margin  2px      INCORRECT CASE EXAMPLE  Using margin   0-9  em search string  without parentheses   The following regex pattern will match the desired lines but matched segments will not be available in replaced string as variables such as  1 or  1    Find  margin   0-9  em  without parentheses  Replace to  margin   1px or margin   1px Result        margin  px       1  is undefined        margin  px       1  is undefined

User · Answer

Looking at Sublime Text Unofficial Documentation s article on Search and Replace  it looks like       is the capture group you might want    but I personally used      and it worked well  To REPLACE in the way you are saying  you might like this conversation in the forums  specifically this post which says to simply use  1 to use the first captured group   And since pictures are better than words     Before    After

User · Answer

Here is a visual presentation of the approved answer

User · Answer

Usually a back-reference is either  1 or  1  backslash one  for the first capture group  the first match of a pattern in parentheses   and indeed Sublime supports both syntaxes  So try   my name used to be  1   or  my name used to be  1   Also note that your original capture pattern   my name is   w     is incorrect and will only capture the final letter of the name rather than the whole name  You should use the following pattern to capture all of the letters of the name   my name is   w

User · Answer

By the way  in the question above   For   Hello  my name is bob   Find part   my name is   w     With replace part   my name used to be  1   Would return   Hello  my name used to be b   Change find part to   my name is   w     And replace will be what you expect   Hello  my name used to be bob   While   w   will match  bob   it is not the grouping you want for replacement

User · Answer

Note that if you use more than 9 capture groups you have to use the syntax   10     10 or  10 or   10  will not work

[regex] Regular expression search replace in Sublime Text 2

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