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How to replace an unkown amount of repetitions of a pattern in regexp?

I am replacing all space indentations in my python files with tab indentations, because for some reasons my indent tool doesn't make the replacement (it does for js, html, css files though).

I am trying to globally replace the pattern with vscode using a regexp, but I can't find the right expression to use. I thought about replacing all four-spaces with tabs: / /g, however at some places in the code there are some special indentation in the middle on an expression that I want to keep. They intend to make the code more readable, and look like this:

    a       = 1
    aaaaaaa = 2
    aaaa    = 3

Replacing these four-spaces will break the alignment, so I want to keep these space indentations (I might replace them later but for now I don't need to bother doing this).

The new pattern I found is a newline followed by an unknown amount of four-spaces: /\n( )*/g. This searches for all classic indentations, excluding the very specific indentations in the middle of an expression. However I cannot find a way to replace these patterns with the correct amount of tabs: I am not replacing one four-space, I am replacing an unknown amount of four-spaces.

How can I replace an unknown amount of repetitions of a pattern with a regexp?

Solution

  • You can use

    (?<=^(?: {4})*) {4}

    Replace with \t. See the regex demo.

    Screenshots with the results:

    enter image description here

    Details:

    • (?<=^(?: {4})*) - a positive lookbehind that matches a location that is immediately preceded with start of a line and then any amount of four space strings
    • {4} - four spaces.