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regexreplacebbedit

Convert white space to tab in BBEdit using grep

I am converting 4-white-space to single-tab in BBEdit using grep. I am converting white space in Python code to tabs. Following works fine:

find:[^\S\r]{4}   replace:\t

However, why the following is removing carriage return. Should not it give the same result. 

find:\s{4} replace:\t
Solution

  • [^\S\r]{4} means "4 characters being either not (not whitespace) or not carriage return: you can simplify it as "4 chars (whitespace or not carriage return)".

    But carriage return matches whitespace. So negating \r has no effect: it can be furthermore simplified as 4 whitespaces actually equivalent to \s{4}

    So you asked for [\t\n ]{4}

    But that doesn't make sense, as no tabulation, carriage return or newline chars should be replaced in your case

    you probably want [ ]{4}: 4 explicit space characters only.