Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2021

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lookbehind assertions ((?<= ) and (?<! ))

Full support62

Full support79

Full support78

No supportNo

Full support49

No supportNo

I was recently hoping Sublime Text's Vintage (vi-emulation) mode would allow me to do a search and replace over specified lines, one of my favorite time-savers from VIm. You know, something like...

:212,216 s/combobox/varTemp/g

No dice. I typed it, and SB2 stood there, looking at me. Dumbly, I might add.

But I thought I remembered it could do multiple cursors:

The shortcuts

To enable multi-selection, you have several options:

    * Press Ctrl + click (Mac is Cmd + click) in each region where you require a 
      cursor.
          o this adds cursors wherever you click
    * Select a block of lines and then press Shift + Command + L.
          o adds cursors after your highlighted block
                + use the right arrow on keyboard to start typing after highlighted
                  block (and not erase what is highlighted)
    * Place the cursor over a particular word, and press Control/Command + D repeatedly
          o to select additional occurrences of that word.
    * Alt+F3 on Windows, (or Ctrl+Command+G on the Mac)
          o adds an additional cursor at all occurrences of a word by typing

Look, that's essentially regular expressions for dummies. It's really really cool. Don't get me wrong. And there are times I'll be using this instead of regexp. But, at the same time, I'll be learning a lot less about regexp doing things this way.

Oh, and it doesn't play especially nicely with Vintage's command mode.

Regardless, score 1 more for ST2.

Labels: regexp, sublime text, vim

Now this is pretty cool, other than Javascript not supporting it... The RegEx Lookbehind. You can find a pattern and return hits only when it's not preceded by another pattern.

So I wanted to find where something was declared in a web/javascript app, not where it was instantiated by pulling it back by id. In this case, we're using the ExtJS framework (probably not my first choice, but a good, robust lib), so document.getElementById() or a jQuery $() is replaced by Ext.getCmp().

So I want to find any example of theObject that's not in the format...
Ext.getCmp("theObject")

Which is to say, I want to find any theObject not preceded by Ext.getCmp("

Here's the lookbehind-ige...
(?<!Ext\.getCmp\(")theObject

SHAZAM. That's neat.

And though it'll chew, JEdit will recursively Hypersearch that into a directory tree, no problems.

And then it'll clue me in that I need to say either " or ' in the regexp. Ooops.

(?<!Ext\.getCmp\(["|'])theObject

Cool.

Labels: problem solved, regexp