![]() ![]() The Grep chapter in BBEdit’s user manual was already very good when I started working at Bare Bones - the entire manual, cover-to-cover, has always been and remains genuinely excellent. I pushed for BBEdit to switch to Philip Hazel’s excellent PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions) library, which supports just about every advanced bit of regex syntax anyone could want - and it’s fast, supports Unicode, written in good clean cross-platform C, and more. If I recall correctly, it was a highly customized version of Henry Spencer’s classic library, which supported only the classic features of regular expression syntax. Long story short, until BBEdit 6.5, BBEdit used a rather basic regex engine. Written by a young guy named John Gruber.Īs for the Grep chapter in BBEdit’s user manual - I did write a significant part of it, but I can’t take and shouldn’t get credit for all of it. One I learned from over 20 years ago: the “Searching with Grep”Ĭhapter in the BBEdit User Manual. Mastering Regular Expressions for a reason, and that reason is notīecause it’s a tutorial. This is too bad, because while Friedl’s book is great, it’s called Topic and have a natural reaction when they see it: A 500+ pageīook to learn how to search for text? No thanks. Regular expressions often hear about this great book on the ![]() Instant visual feedback with undo support - I’ve worked with text this way since 1992.Įven worse, people who are thinking they should start using But even when I do write a script to automate some sort of text munging, it inevitably starts with me working out the regex transformations step-by-step in BBEdit. I’m only going to make a proper script if it’s something I know or suspect I’ll reuse. If the task at hand is something I only need to do once or twice, right now, it’s simply easier to just do it in BBEdit. What Drang describes above is my process too. Why use Excel for date transformations when scripting languages all have extensive date libraries? String together any number of individual munging steps.)Īfter I linked to Snell’s piece, a reader emailed to ask why I didn’t think this would’ve been better solved by writing a script in Perl/Python/Ruby or any other language with good regex support. Python or Ruby or whatever, BBEdit’s Text Factories allow you to (And if you expect to do a series of text transformations oftenĪnd really don’t want to get into writing scripts in Perl or Getting immediate feedback on each transformation step. Playing around in BBEdit to see what searches, replacements, and Just large-scale text editing or if I expect to be repeating the Typically resort to that only if the problem requires more than ![]() Drang, regarding Jason Snell’s tale of using BBEdit and Excel to create a working RSS feed for an old podcast, “ Don’t Fear the Regex”:Īlthough I do often write short programs for text munging, I On Getting Started With Regular Expressions Friday, 11 January 2019ĭr. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |