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From: Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: Confused first time Kate user
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2024 17:05:40 +0200
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On 02.07.2024 16:40, Richard Owlett wrote:
> I have a Debian machine with Kate Version 16.08.3 .

Disclaimer: I don't know the Kate editor. But I know Regular
Expressions (RE).

> 
> I wish to do a search & replace using regular expressions.
> The "Help" menu has led to
> https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/kate/katepart/regular-expressions.html
> and
> https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/kate/katepart/regex-patterns.html
> 
> I have strings of the form "XYZn" where n is one to three digits
> representing values of from 1 to 299. I wish to replace all occurrences
> with "abc".

You may do that with simple patterns if you don't have, say,
strings like XYZ300 that shall be disregarded. Then the RE
may simply be  XYZ[0-9]+  meaning any string XYZ that is
followed by an arbitrary number of digits. Instead you can
specify digits as optional  XYZ[0-9][0-9]?[0-9]?  or define
the amount of digits (1-3) explicitly  XYZ[0-9]{1,3}  which
still allows numbers out of range 1..299 (say, 0, 300) or
undesired syntaxes like 00 or 000. - Not sure it matters in
your case. If it matters, you can define alternatives with
a bar-symbol, e.g.,  XYZ([1-9]|[1-9][0-9]|[1-2][0-9][0-9])
that you group with parenthesis.

Where you put such regular expressions in your Kate editor
is known to you, I suppose?

> 
> The documents give essentially no examples.

Regular expressions may first appear confusing, but the links
you posted actually has relevant examples.

> 
> Help please.
> TIA

Hope that helps.

Janis