Replace function using REGEX and (.*) does not replace backreference using '\1' or '$1'

Scrivener Windows Beta (Archived)
1

This must be a bug: The back reference doesn’t work in replace function? What good is it if it doesn’t? I mean, you can do some simpleminded things but can’t you find a good RegEx package to use? This is rather annoying to learn after so much time editing in a large document with the promise that Scrivener supported RegEx. It doesn’t really.

Will this be fixed prior to publication of the master? Can we get multi-file regex search/replace? Full regex goodness? Please?

Thanks. -Don

2

I expect they’re using QT’s regex, which should be PCRE.

doc.qt.io/qt-5/qregexp.html#details

However, QtRegExp is not completely perl compatible. If it’s not doing backward capture, it should be.

I tested this…

The QT reference give gives a specific example of a regular expression.

\b(\w+)\W+\1\b

Which searches for any word followed by word characters followed by non-word characters followed by the same word followed by a word boundary.

I put text in a document. And that was "that."

Which should meet the search condition. “that” is followed by word characters (was) followed by 1 or more non-word characters (") followed by the same word, (that), followed by a Word boundary (.).

The search using the regular expression found nothing, and it should have found one match. I tried another (much simpler use: \b(\w+).*\1\b , which should match a word, followed by any number of characters, and then that word again).

I’d have to say the bug is confirmed; regex is not working as expected.