Thought I found a regular expression bug

[shoeboy]

I may have found a regular expression bug:
Replace:
+\|\| +

With:
+

Text:
+

Result:
618626 length string of " + ...."

[ben_josephs]

You're asking it to replace a non-empty sequence of spaces OR nothing OR a non-empty sequence of spaces with a plus sign. If your current position is just in front of a plus sign in your document, TextPad doesn't find a non-empty sequence of spaces there, but it does find a nothing. So it replaces that nothing with a plus sign. Its position is now just in front of the original plus sign, as it was before. So it does the same thing again, and again,... until you stop it.

What were you trying to do?

Here's a useful tip: use Posix syntax for your regular expressions. It makes them much more intelligible:

Configure | Preferences | Editor

[X] Use POSIX regular expression syntax

Then you can do without the backslashes in your regular expression.