[ALUG] regex, kate, gedit

[Chris G]

On Tue, Dec 04, 2007 at 08:46:12AM +0000, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
> Hi, probably a silly question with an utterly obvious answer, but it would be 
> great if someone can enlighten on it!
> 
> I'm searching and replacing a text file.  In gedit, if I search for \n\r I 
> get, as expected, a match at every line end.  Same with \n or \r.
> 
> However, in Kate or Geany, I do not.  Tearing hair out.  What could be the 
> problem?  I've tried
> 
> \n
> [\n]
> 
> I've tried building up the expression in the K regex builder.  I've tried 
> selecting the line feed character and doing copy and paste.  In Gedit it 
> yields \n\r.  In Geany it yields a couple of small square boxes with dots in 
> them, which I then can't search on.
> 
It's probably because Kate and Geany don't treat the whole file as a
single stream of characters, they regard each line as a separate
entity with separators between and so don't allow you to search for
'end of line'.  They *might* have a special character for end-of-line,
the standard to use in REs is $ but in proper REs that's a virtual
character that exists between the \n (and \r if it's there) and the
next line, you can't search for $ (where it means end-of-line) you can
only use it as an RE delimiter really.

> Changing the coding doesn't seem to help either.  At least, the ones I have 
> tried.  Is this likely to be the explanation?  It displays fine however, so 
> how do I find out which different coding to use?
> 
> I would just do it in Gedit, except that as usual in the effort to make their 
> apps unusable for anyone who wants to use them for anything, Gnome decline to 
> support regex.....
> 
I suspect that you'll need to use sed or awk or vi or emacs.

-- 
Chris Green