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.