Hi,
why is only the first match replaced using this macro when acting on multiple lines? The ''All Matches'' option has been chosen for this action.
Input:
*Test1
*Test2
*Test3
*Test4
Output:
* Test1
*Test2
*Test3
*Test4
Expected output:
* Test1
* Test2
* Test3
* Test4
Text ersetzen- Leerzeichen nach Aufzählungszeichen (*).kmmacros (2.4 KB)
Thanks for help!
If I know my Regex correctly you need to add the multiline (?m) flag to the beginning of the search string for it to match on each line. Otherwise the ^ will only match start of (whole) string.
Your search string would then look like: (?m)^\*([^ \t\r\n])
Thanks, this works. I don't get however, why other macros without this flag work for multi line replacement, e.g.
Text ersetzen- Punkt an Zeilenende (falls nicht vorhanden).kmmacros (2.4 KB)
As described in the reg ex reference the m flag controls the behavior of “^” and “$” in a pattern. By default these will only match at the start and end, respectively, of the input text. If this flag is set, “^” and “$” will also match at the start and end of each line within the input text.
So I don't know what your second example is supposed to do, but by default ^ matches only the start of the text, not the start of the line, and $ matches only the end of the text, not the end of the line.
Out of interest, what does
...actually do? It looks like an overly complicated (== resource expensive) way of adding a period to the end of any string (or line, with the m option) that doesn't end with a period.
But lookaheads always confuse me. What am I missing?
To make this a bit more useful...
If you are developing/testing your regexs on regex101.com, remember that it defaults to "global, multiline":
...and you'll need to either change that or remember to add (?m) to the start of your pattern in KM.
Thanks @peternlewis for pointing me to the reference. @Nige_S: The action adds a period to the end of any line that doesn't end with a period 
and the regex checks if the line ends with a period. There is likely a simpler way to implement this.
Yes. Keyboard Maestro defaults to global. But multiline is a different flag. As is single line. Neither of which are enabled by default in Keyboard Maestro.
At my system I again have to add the multiline flag (?m), to the beginning of your search expression ^(?!.*\.$)(.*), for it to do what you are saying it is supposed to do.
But to make sure every line ends with at least one period, I think I'd set it up like this with Search And Replace using Regex:
Search and Replace.kmactions (561 B)
(KM v11.0.4)
.
If one wants it to alway normalize the number of line ending periods to one, you could replace the question mark ? with an asterisk *, for it to match any number of consecutive line ending periods and replacing it with a single one.
The regex adds a period to every line that doesn't end with a period -- including empty lines and lines that end with ? or !.
a
b!
...transforms to
a.
.
b!.
Is that what you want? It may not matter, of course, depending on your source text.
But it may be that you only want to add a period after any "word" character -- letters, numbers, or underscores, in which case your regex would be
(?m)([:word:])$
Don't want to include underscores? How about the [:alnum:] POSIX character class?
(?m)([:alnum:])$
Or if you like the negative approach, how about "match if the line doesn't end with a character in the 'punctuation' or 'space' (which includes line breaks) classes":
(?m)([^[:punct:][:space:]])$
As you can see, there's many ways to do this -- it really depends on exactly what you want to do.
There's a handy list of POSIX character classes at www.regular-expressions.info