Jedit: regular expression - how to?

Question

It have source code that contains sections like this:

<pre>  text
</pre>

long long text

<pre>  text
</pre>

long long text

I have to find this entry

<pre>  text
</pre>

in JEdit and replace it with space. (I read the regex rules in the JEdit documentation.)

My expression is:

<pre>([\.\n]*?)</pre>

But it couldn't find the entry.

What expression should be correct?

This free tool very useful for debugging regex http://www.radsoftware.com.au/regexdesigner/ — WileCau, Dec 09 '11 at 12:24

codaddict · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-09T12:27:09.777

3

In your regex the . is being treated literally and not as a meta-character to match any character except newline.

Try:

<pre>(.|\n)*?</pre>

Since the OS is not specified, a newline can be represented by either a \n (Unixes) or a \r\n (windows). In either case you can use:

<pre>(.|\r?\n)*?</pre>

edited Dec 09 '11 at 12:27

answered Dec 09 '11 at 12:12

codaddict

+1 for your explanation. One tiny issue, I would add `\r` to the alternation, because you don't know what the newline character is (or do you?) – stema Dec 09 '11 at 12:16
@stema: You are right, the existing solution will not work for Windows. – codaddict Dec 09 '11 at 12:27
Alternatively to `\r?\n` you can use `\R`. – Gary Aug 23 '18 at 18:56

1 Answers1