Re: Confused first time Kate user

On 02.07.2024 16:40, Richard Owlett wrote:

I have a Debian machine with Kate Version 16.08.3 .

Disclaimer: I don't know the Kate editor. But I know Regular
Expressions (RE).

 
I wish to do a search & replace using regular expressions.
The "Help" menu has led to
https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/kate/katepart/regular-expressions.html
and
https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/kate/katepart/regex-patterns.html
 
I have strings of the form "XYZn" where n is one to three digits
representing values of from 1 to 299. I wish to replace all occurrences
with "abc".

You may do that with simple patterns if you don't have, say,
strings like XYZ300 that shall be disregarded. Then the RE
may simply be  XYZ[0-9]+  meaning any string XYZ that is
followed by an arbitrary number of digits. Instead you can
specify digits as optional  XYZ[0-9][0-9]?[0-9]?  or define
the amount of digits (1-3) explicitly  XYZ[0-9]{1,3}  which
still allows numbers out of range 1..299 (say, 0, 300) or
undesired syntaxes like 00 or 000. - Not sure it matters in
your case. If it matters, you can define alternatives with
a bar-symbol, e.g.,  XYZ([1-9]|[1-9][0-9]|[1-2][0-9][0-9])
that you group with parenthesis.

Where you put such regular expressions in your Kate editor
is known to you, I suppose?

 
The documents give essentially no examples.

Regular expressions may first appear confusing, but the links
you posted actually has relevant examples.

 
Help please.
TIA

Hope that helps.

Janis