VS Code Find in current file: Regular Expressions

Question

This is find and replace issue in VS Code.

I want to find the following text in my Markdown file in VS Code:

## [](https://www.website.com/)Heading

and Replace with this text

 ## [Heading](https://www.website.com/)

So I use ## \[]\(.+?\)(.*) to find the expressions. But to replace with the above expression I typed this ## [$1]\(.+?\)(.*) but it doesn't works. How can I do this? Do regular expression doesn't work in replace?

Answer 1

In order to juggle the order of string parts one of the approaches is to first capture the whole string with all the respective parts.

Let’s look at the screenshot below. Every portion of the string is mapped to a numbered group. There are 6 of them in this example. Having all parts captured as groups allows precisely controlling the substitution section.



In VS Code it would look like this:
Find: (##)(\s+)(\[)(\])(\(.*?\))(Heading)
Replace: $1$2$3$6$4$5
INPUT
## [](https://www.website.com/)Heading
OUTPUT
## [Heading](https://www.website.com/)

Let's try something more general:
Find: (##)(\s+)(\[)(\])(\(.*?\))([^^]+)
Replace: $1$2$3$6$4$5
INPUT
## [](https://www.website.com/)Heading
## [](https://www.website2.com/)Heading2
## [](https://www.website3.com/)Heading3
OUTPUT
## [Heading](https://www.website.com/)
## [Heading2](https://www.website2.com/)
## [Heading3](https://www.website3.com/)