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Why doesn't <example regular expression here> work in NotePad++?

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Given that the Notepad++ online help is just plain wrong on this, I think this is a worthwhile topic, although it could, of course, be edited to actually include content ;) – Daniel Beck Sep 25 '11 at 15:38
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You cannot make a question community wiki. If you believe a question should be CW, flag it for moderator attention using the free-text box. See this Meta Stack Overflow question and waffles's answer for more information. – DragonLord Sep 25 '11 at 16:40
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I'm tempted to vote to close. I just don't understand what's the real question here. Why Notepad++ doesn't have it? Who knows? Lazyness? A bug? Shouldn't the real question be how to get such a feature? The fact that you self-answered makes me think it's the latter. Which isn't a problem, at all, but kind of confusing. – slhck Sep 25 '11 at 17:17
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@slhck - I understand - do what you think best. You may be confused- look at the link in the answer. Notepad++ has regex - it's just very quirky. My thought was that many people end up confused by this (certainly I've been multiple times). I thought it would be good to have a post that a Google search will likely hit and clue the searcher that there's a generic issue. The alternative was to go through all the [notepad++][regex] posts and add a comment to each one where this is relevant and hasn't been said already - that's more than I'm willing to volunteer for! – Ed Staub Sep 25 '11 at 17:24
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@LanceRoberts: Since when do we keep questions open based on usefulness? This question is really rhetorical, you can't expect any other answer than because it's not there; nothing that we do helps the user use Notepad++ or his computer in a better way so this is not our terrain. As Sathya referred, if one wants to understand the internals then Stack Overflow or perhaps Programmers is the site where you can find more information. But as there are enough duplicates, there is no point in migrating sand... – Tom Wijsman Sep 25 '11 at 19:57
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closed as not a real question by grawity, Gareth, Wuffers, DragonLord, Hello71 Sep 25 '11 at 17:21

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. See the FAQ for guidance on how to improve it.

1 Answer

up vote 4 down vote

NotePad++ is missing many common regex features, and some others have unusual syntax.

The correct documentation for regular expressions is a bit hard to find, and as Daniel points out, there's even documentation that says they meet Posix, which isn't right.

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sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/notepad-plus/… is a link to unsupported regex expressions – Sathya♦ Sep 25 '11 at 17:42
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