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regexsublimetext3

Is there a way of making sublime snippets with a regex trigger?

I'm trying to make a snippet that is triggered by a regular expression. Is it even possible in Sublime Text 3?

I've tried this but it doesn't trigger. I've already checked that sublime replaces it correctly with the Find and Replace option.

<snippet>
<content><![CDATA[$1_$2
]]></content>
<tabTrigger>([a-zA-z])(\d)</tabTrigger>
<description></description>
<scope>text.tex.latex</scope>
</snippet>

I want my snippet to be triggered by pressing tab after any word that matches a character followed by a digit and replace it with the character, a _, and the digit.

Examples

a1 turns into a_1

X0 turns into X_0

Solution

  • The trigger text for a sublime-snippet file has to be literal text in order to trigger; Sublime won't match it based on a regular expression. To do something like that you need a plugin command that is bound to the tab key (for example) that triggers a command that examines the text to the left of the cursor to see if it matches the regex and then expand it based on that.

    I'm not aware of a general purpose package that does something like this (although Emmet does this for expanding HTML tags, it's not generic and is known to interfere with regular tab completion) but there may be one listed on package control.

    This forum post on the Sublime forum includes a sample plugin that does something very similar to this that may be useful as a starting point for something like this, though. Based on your examples above, it should do what you want as long as you swap the scope in the example for the one from your snippet so that it triggeres in LaTeX files instead of Markdown. You may want to rename the command as well in that case.

    [Edit] If you're not sure how to use plugin in Sublime Text, this video covers how to do it.