Performing a Regular Expression find-replace in nvALT

Question

I'm using Keyboard Maestro on my Mac to perform a regex find-replace in an nvALT document.

The Keyboard Maestro part of it is not that complicated. It just copies selected text from nvALT, performs the find-replace, and then pastes the text.

I can capture line breaks, but can't seem to put them back in. For example, if I take the text

penguin
horse
robot

Setting the "find" string to

(?m)\n

and the "replace" string to

\n

Then I get

penguinnhorsenrobot

Obviously, the query is seeing and finding line breaks. I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.

Thanks

What are you trying to do? What point is there to finding and replacing characters with themselves (which has no effect)? — Bohemian, Feb 17 '14 at 18:14
You're absolutely right, this wouldn't change the text. I didn't really want to perform this query. I just used it as an example because it shows that regex wildcards are working as "find" strings but not as "replace" strings. — Jack Brannen, Feb 18 '14 at 19:03

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 01 '14 at 15:27

1

Keyboard Maestro supports backreferences, so you can use those to solve your problem.

You can set the 'search' string to

(?m)(\n)

and the 'replace' string to

$1

to get what you want.

Here's an example on regex101.com.

answered Mar 01 '14 at 15:27

Chirag Bhatia - chirag64

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Hi @Chirag64, thanks. You're right that this would solve the problem for this particular issue, but I'm looking for a more multipurpose solution. For example, a more common use case for me would be removing _double_ line breaks. I can use your solution again, but I'd have to group each line break separately in my query. Obviously that's not a very flexible solution. (Though I sincerely appreciate your help.) I'm really trying to figure out why nvALT doesn't handle this normally. – Jack Brannen Mar 03 '14 at 02:32

Performing a Regular Expression find-replace in nvALT

1 Answers1