Regular expression search replace in Sublime Text 2

Question

I'm looking to do search replace with regular expressions in Sublime Text 2. The documentation on this is rather anemic. Specifically, I want to do a replace on groups, so something like converting this text:

Hello my name is bob

And this search term:

Find what: my name is (\w)+

Replace with: my name used to be $(1)

The search term works just fine but I can't figure out a way to actually do a replace using the regexp group.

user_1224827 · Answer

Looking at Sublime Text Unofficial Documentation's article on Search and Replace, it looks like +(.+) is the capture group you might want... but I personally used (.*) and it worked well. To REPLACE in the way you are saying, you might like this conversation in the forums, specifically this post which says to simply use $1 to use the first captured group.

And since pictures are better than words...

Before:

After:

And since pictures are better than words...

Before:

After:

Regular expression search replace in Sublime Text 2

6 Answers