Re: [libreoffice-users] Find and replace - regular expressions

At 18:56 27/10/2013 -0500, T. R. Valentine wrote:
> On 27 October 2013 18:50, Tim Lloyd wrote:
> > [...]
>
> I think you read my question incorrectly.

That's because your original question was not at all clear!  (You owe 
it to correspondents not to waste their time.)

> Specifically, I am able to use regular expressions to search for a 
> one to many-digit number: \d*
> But I want to leave the number (whatever it may be) in place and 
> insert a tab immediately after it. I expected I should be able to 
> use: \1\t but LO is interpreting the \1 *literally* instead of as a 
> backreference.

There are two things wrong here, I think.  First, although \1, \2, 
and so on can be used to refer back to parts of the "Search for" 
field *within the "Search for" field itself*, the corresponding 
syntax in the "Replace with" field is $1, $2, and so on.  But then 
you also have to mark which part of the matched string you want to 
refer back to - and you do that using parentheses in the Search field.

If you want to refer to the entire matched string using $1, you must 
use (\d*) as your search string.  But - easier than that - you can 
always refer to the entire matched string using the ampersand: & (or 
you can use $0).  In that case the parentheses are unnecessary in the 
search string: you would search for \d* and replace with &\t.

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker


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