Find and replace text

Patterns in five minutes

With Pattern on, the Find box takes a regular expression, written the way JavaScript reads it. A handful of pieces cover most jobs:

In Replace with, $1 and $2 put back what the first and second groups found, and $& the whole match. Two details matter. Text Studio searches the text as one block, so ^ and $ mean its very start and end, not the start and end of each line. And a pattern that cannot be read shows “Not a pattern” where the count would be. To build and test a long pattern, the Dev Toolbox has a regex tester.

Replacements worth knowing

Take the first row apart and the method is clear: each pair of round brackets is a group, so the month is $1, the day $2 and the year $3, and the replacement puts them back in a new order with hyphens between. The second row does the same with two words around a comma.

Replace all always works on the whole text, even when part of it is selected, and Ctrl Z takes it back in one step. Without Pattern, the replacement is used exactly as typed, so $10 stays $10; with Pattern on, write $$ for a dollar sign.

Small things that make it dependable

• Whole words knows letters from every alphabet, so “café” does not match inside “cafés”, just as “cat” skips “category”.
• With Match case off, capitals are ignored: “mark” finds Mark and MARK as well.
• Replace changes the current match, so pressing it again and again works through the matches in order, one at a time, when each needs a look first.
• The count is a check before you commit: if it says 12 matches, Replace all will change twelve places, and a number that looks too high means the search is too broad.
• Matches are painted in texts of up to 300,000 characters. Longer texts are still searched, and the count stops at 10,000 even though Replace all replaces every match.
• Esc closes the find bar and puts you back in the text.

Working on files

Open a file with Open, make the replacements, and Save writes them back; Ctrl Shift S saves a copy under a new name instead. Text Studio opens .txt, .md, .csv, .tsv, .log, .json, .xml, .html, .css, .js, .ts, .ini, .yaml and .srt files, so a renamed product in a CSV, a new server name in a config file or a misspelled name in subtitles is a few keystrokes away. It works on one file at a time, not across a folder.

Subtitles show why the search matters more than the replacement: to fix a misspelled name across a whole .srt, search for the name with Whole words on, check the count, and Replace all. The caption numbers and timestamps cannot match a name, so they stay as they were.

To see exactly what a Replace all changed, press Copy all before it, then open Compare afterwards and paste: every line the replacement touched is marked.