Regex - replace only part of a string - how?
 

I have often problems with books that were auto-converted by Calibre. Here is one issue:

Text has often wrong line breaks.

Example:

I can find it with the string:

But when I replace it then (of course) the last letter is missing. Without the [a-z] I would catch normal end of sentence line breaks.

Is there a way?


DOH! I found it!


Search string: (\w+)</p>

<p class="calibre2">

Replace with: \1

Please let me add one more common problem: wrong hyphen (probably from the PDF)

Search: (\w)-(\w)
replace with: \1\2

How can I make it case sensitive? I like to correct 'ele-phant' but not 'John-Bob' ?

I think a brute force approach would be
([a-z]\w)-(\w)

Thanks.

Seems '([a-z])-([a-z])' with a clicked 'Match Cases' is OK too.

Use the posix character classes rather, for your example : ([[:lower:]])-([[:lower:]])

List of posix char classes

[[:lower:]]?

I guess you mean [:lower:]
But honestly, I find [a-z] way easier to write. Especially since I have to add some German letters often, like [a-zäöüß]

Nope. [[:lower:]] is the correct usage.

I was used to write [a-z] for lowercase letters too, but since I discovered that unicode properties flag is working in Sigil 0.5 (*UCP), I simply use character classes with it to cover non-ASCII letters.
\w, \W, [:lower:], [:upper:], [:alpha:], [:alnum:] are all affected by (*UCP).

I really had to check these...
You are (of course) right, I was wrong.
I never tried those since I never saw a reason to use them...

They're great, since they cover your unicode characters too, for example you dont have to add ä,ß, etc - they are already understood to be lowercase.

[a-zäöüß] will all be captured by [[:lower:]], as well as a load more of edge cases which you might not have thought of. Saving you time, making edits more complete. The punct class is also especially useful - and very often overlooked.

The more you know!

I just checked. [[:lower:]] does NOT find äöüß.

@WS64: add (*UCP) in front of your pattern like: