Regex Question: Why is terminating | required?

Questions & Suggestions
8

UPDATE:

@unlocked2412, @kevinb, and @Airy:

I appreciate your efforts, and I owe you an apology for wasting your time!

Since @Airy and I had different observations, I suspected there must be something unforeseen at work. So I copied the XML for the Search and Replace action and pasted it into BBEdit.

Look what I found! There is a newline after the %Variable%local_Pattern% and before the </string>.

With the newline removed the action is working as expected.

		<dict>
			<key>Action</key>
			<string>CaseSensitiveRegEx</string>
			<key>ActionUID</key>
			<integer>16720755</integer>
			<key>Destination</key>
			<string>Variable</string>
			<key>DestinationVariable</key>
			<string>local_Text</string>
			<key>MacroActionType</key>
			<string>SearchReplace</string>
			<key>Replace</key>
			<string>-</string>
			<key>Search</key>
			<string>%Variable%local_Pattern%
</string>
			<key>Source</key>
			<string>Text</string>
			<key>Text</key>
			<string>.This sentence has two colons (::) and three slashes (///).</string>
			<key>Which</key>
			<string>All</string>
		</dict>

Again, thanks for your help! This forum includes so many incredibly helpful users!

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