Why won't this regex work in SublimeText when it does in Vim?

Question

I have this regex

^\([^\t]*\)\t\([^\t]*\)\t\([^\t]*\)$

which is supposed to match

beginning of the line
a capture of all letter until a Tab
a capture of all letter until a Tab
a capture of all letter until a Tab
the EOL

In Vim, this works fine:

But in Sublime it will not match. Why?

Interesting ratio of upvotes to views - i wonder if this is a common issue that many don't think to search about — New Alexandria, Sep 05 '18 at 12:56

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 01 '18 at 20:17

Vim regex is rather specific and differs from the PCRE regex engine expression syntax that Sublime Text 3 uses.

In Sublime Text 3, you can write the pattern you used in Vim as

^([^\t\r\n]*)\t([^\t\r\n]*)\t([^\t\r\n]*)$

See the regex demo

In short, (...) should be used to form a capturing group, and you need to add \r\n to disallow a negated character class to match across lines (in Vim, [^.]* won't match a line break, but it will in Sublime Text 3).

Note that (...) (and not \(...\)) can also be used as a capturing group in Vim, but you need to use very magic mode to use that syntax.

Why won't this regex work in SublimeText when it does in Vim?

1 Answers1