Question: same functionality in WildEdit as TextPad?

daniel347x · Post by **daniel347x** » Fri Dec 31, 2004 1:28 am

Hello,

I have happily been doing the equivalent of a Search And Replace in Files in TextPad for years, by doing a Find in Files (with or without regular expression), then opening all of those files from the Search Results window, and finally, by doing a Replace in All Open Documents.

I was wondering if this is the equivalent functionality as WildEdit, with the exception that in WildEdit you can undo changes, preview changes, and save steps opening files from the Results window. Are there other reasons, besides these, to use WildEdit, rather than TextPad's similar features?

Best regards,

Dan Nissenbaum

Post by **MudGuard** » Fri Dec 31, 2004 9:28 am

Besides the advantages you already mentioned:

WildEdit's regex machine is much better:
- support for lookahead assertions (match something only if it is followed by some other thing - but without including the other thing in the match)
- nongreedy repeats (*? +?)
- non-marking parentheses (if you only need to group a part but don't need that part in the replacement)
- multiline expressions (in TP, \n can't be in a repeated expression, in WE it can - as in \n+)
- Perl-style short notations (\d instead of [[:digit:]] and some more)

Other advantages:
- support of lots of encodings
- textareas for input of regex - you can better see longer expressions

(these are the advantages that come to mind immediately - the lists might not be complete)