The Compiler IDE supports to use of regular expressions for all of its find and replace operations. This can be enabled and disabled using the Use Regular Expressions option to the Edit menu or its shortcut (Alt+R). Once enabled or disabled, this setting will be preserved across sessions.
When used, regular expressions will only match ranges within a single line, never matching over multiple lines.
Regular expressions must be written in the ECMAScript grammar, generally similar to the grammar used by JavaScript and the .NET languages. Invalid regular expressions will cause an error message.
For more information about the grammar see:
- https://cplusplus.com/reference/regex/ECMAScript/
![[external link]](images/extlink.svg)
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/standard-library/regular-expressions-cpp
- https://regex101.com/r/fYE7S3/1
When replacing using regular expressions the replace string may contain the following special escape sequences:
| Escape Sequence | Meaning |
| $1 through $9 or \1 through \9 | Contents of the corresponding capture group |
| $& or \0 | Complete match contents |
| $$ | A literal '$' character |
| \\, \a, \b, \f, \r, \n, \t, \v | A literal '\', '\a', '\b', etc. character |
For example, if the search string was (Ex)(ample) and the replace string was $2$1, when applied to a script saying "Examples" this would modify the script to say "ampleExs". Or if the replace string was $1\r\n$2 this would put a newline between "Ex" and "amples".