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No custom quantifiers in regular expressions

shreyder
2007-09-05
2012-11-13
  • shreyder

    shreyder - 2007-09-05

    Notepad++ does not support regular expressions with custom quantifiers in braces, e.g [a-zA-Z]{2,5} or A{6}, just the quantifiers * and +.

     
    • pshute

      pshute - 2007-09-06

      Yes, I noticed that too.  Notepad++ is based on Scintilla, and apparently all the shortcomings of its regular expression support are inherited from that project.  I think you'd need to ask for it to be fixed in that project in order to get it fixed in Notepad++.

       
    • Nobody/Anonymous

      I really think the limitations of the regular expressions in notepad++ should be made clear in the FAQ for regular expressions.
      I know that it does state what it can do but it would be helpful to see a sentence like "currently Notepad++ only supports the greedy quantifiers * and +". And it's practically impossible to match something over multiple line. I know it's my own fault for spending literally hours to get reluctant quantifiers and multiline-matches to work (and failing at that) but I just want to save others from trying to do the same.

       
    • Nobody/Anonymous

      oh and I forgot to say that I used notepad RE (notepad Regular Expressions) to solve my little regular expression problem. I just want to point people who had the same problem I had to a programm that has very good regExp support (it's no alternative to npp because it's simply notepad with taped on Regular expression search/replace). If you think this is too much of an advertising be free to delete this post.

       
      • Nobody/Anonymous

        Reading and thinking I understand your complaint, would it be hard to advertise your experience here? I mean to say, you did a lot of work, so you probably know now what is and what is not possible with Notepad++ Regular Expressions. Could you add the list of your findings here? I guess that would be the most of help you can provide. Thanks!

         
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