Re: Confused first time Kate user

On 07/02/2024 10:05 AM, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

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.

What I must avoid is it recognizing XYZ0 as a match.
That would create chaos ;/

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.

If Kate accepts XYZ([1-9]|[1-9][0-9]|[1-2][0-9][0-9]) as proper syntax, it should do what I was trying to specify.
Having spent decades in QA/QC related tasks, I pay close attention to my first reference explicitly warning that Kate does not handle regular expressions exactly the same as some other editors. Hence the first lined of my post ;}

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

Yes. There are some advantages to a GUI ;}
In fact I just tried it.
I gave it:

XYZ hello world
XYZ0 hello world
XYZ017 hello world
XYZ1 hello world
XYZ34 hello world
XYZ999 hello world

It correctly replied:

XYZ hello world
XYZ0 hello world
XYZ017 hello world
abc hello world
abc hello world
abc9 hello world

 

>
The documents give essentially no examples.

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

No problem with regular expressions per se.
As my background was component level analog electronics, I ended up working for DEC in Power Supply Engineering in mid-70's. My intro to regular expressions was observing guys in adjacent department having fun with TECO.

 

>
Help please.
TIA

 Hope that helps.

IT DID!

 Janis