Appending to a line

[Dave Simpson]

I've looked at Creating Subpatterns in then manual but I'm sorry but a lot of the syntax is going over my head :-(

I'm not a power user and generally just need to do straightforward search/replace.

I want to search a text file.

Every time a line begins 2 PLAC

I want to append the word England to the end of the line.

Hope someone can help

[Christian Boyce]

This GREP stuff is really worth learning. 

However, I can help you with this particular problem, because it’s easy.

You want to do a GREP search, with search string like this:

^(2 PLAC)(.*)$

And you want to replace with this:

\1\2 England

That’s it. Try it.

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[Dave Simpson]

Many thanks Christian, it much appreciated.

[Bucky Junior]

I was fortunate to learn some bits of regex/grep from helpful people on this list who not only showed an answer to a question but explained what was happening. While this search/replace using grep is quite simple, it’s not always obvious to everyone.

> On May 8, 2022, at 1:36 PM, Dave Simpson <quar...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> You want to do a GREP search, with search string like this:
>
> ^(2 PLAC)(.*)$
>
> And you want to replace with this:
>
> \1\2 England
>
> That’s it. Try it.
>

In the search pattern:
^ means start at the beginning of a line
(2 PLAC) parentheses bracket the search text and “remembers" it. In this case, it is known characters. Grep lets you search for unknown/partially known characters too.
(.*) second parentheses uses “.” As any character except newline or carriage return. The asterisk expands that to zero or more characters.
$ means the end of the line.

The replacement is
\1 first parentheses “remembered” pattern
\2 follow that with the second
England end the replacement with a space and then the literal text “England”

That’s mostly this grep/replace. You know the BBEdit Manual has lots more.
Bucky

[Christian Boyce]

Great explanation Bucky— I shouldn’t have been so lazy as to not give an explanation myself! Thanks for doing what I should have done. It’s perfect.

[Dave Simpson]

Thanks Bucky

That helps me a lot.

Dave

[Roger Moffat]

I would add to this that the original poster probably wanted to add

, England

to the end of each place, rather than just 

England

So replace with

\12\, England

is required.

Roger

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