search & replace regular expression help

[ni_c]

Btw, ive had a need to use escapes with some regex searches, and wondering if the way to describe escapes is like saying "treat the next character as plain text, rather than regular expression" because using (.*?) or (\d+) whenever square brackets are present like <span>[page (.*?)]</span> or <span>[page (\d+)]</span> doesnt work, but adding backslashes before each square bracket like <span>\[page (.*?)\]</span> does

[theducks]

Originally Posted by ni_c

Btw, ive had a need to use escapes with some regex searches, and wondering if the way to describe escapes is like saying "treat the next character as plain text, rather than regular expression" because using (.*?) or (\d+) whenever square brackets are present like <span>[page (.*?)]</span> or <span>[page (\d+)]</span> doesnt work, but adding backslashes before each square bracket like <span>\[page (.*?)\]</span> does

any find TEXT character that has special meaning to REGEX needs to be escaped

[ ] is a 'set', ( ) is a group
dot, asterisk, question mark or slash

Grab yourself a 'Cheatography' REGEX Quick reference guide and keep it handy.
Just remember that not everything shown works will our REGEX variant.

[eschwartz]

@ni_c,

Correct. See: http://www.regular-expressions.info/characters.html


Brackets are special characters, which say "treat everything in between as a character set, and match on any".
Escaping with a backslash turns them into literal (plain old text) brackets.

[ni_c]

thanks and thanks, that cheatography will help