Tell me more ×
Super User is a question and answer site for computer enthusiasts and power users. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 5 down vote favorite

Skype has the following in their help section

/find [text]

Finds specific text in a chat. For example, /find Lucien will return the first instance of the word "Lucien" in the chat.

I have not able to find one for s/ but it works.

so far I was able to try

s/old/new/
s/old and new/new and new/

Can anyone describe what are the features that are available to me in the s/ and /find commands ? For example: Can I replace in multiple lines ?

share|improve this question
Related but not a dupe: superuser.com/questions/95155/regex-edit-in-skype – Lord Torgamus Feb 16 '11 at 17:17
Beware that the recipient might not see the changes. Don't know why, but I've seen my old text on the screens of my colleagues long after I edited a word. And no feedback whatsoever. – Arjan Feb 16 '11 at 17:22

1 Answer

up vote 7 down vote accepted

The s/ command is a carryover from the old UNIX command sed. Contrary to what a lot of people on the Internet seem to think — based on my recent Googling — it isn't related to regular expressions. There's a great reference for sed here.

However, Skype seems to only support the basic syntax, and only for the most recent message. If another message has been sent or received, you're out of luck. This easter egg only works on non-Windows versions, and assumes that the g or global flag is set. There doesn't seem to be any official documentation about this from Skype itself.

share|improve this answer
Not sure if you're saying otherwise, but surely sed allows for regular expressions in its substitute command. – Arjan Feb 16 '11 at 17:21
@Arjan, sorry, I was trying to say that a lot of blog posts about this feature seem to think that s/old/new is itself a regular expression. FWIW though, it seems that this "Skype sed" doesn't support regexps, just exact text matches. – Lord Torgamus Feb 16 '11 at 17:24
FYI, ed had s/// in 1971, two years before sed, and it too did regexps. – grawity Feb 16 '11 at 20:31
Hmmm, where does the term regex stop? I'd say a regular expression is more than just its pattern. In Perl, I'd call the whole substitute operation a regex, like in $a =~ s/foo/bar/g;. But I might be wrong. – Arjan Feb 16 '11 at 20:51
@grawity, yeah, I did come across that in my travels, but I think it's much more associated with sed, so I went with that. – Lord Torgamus Feb 16 '11 at 21:04

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.