The first rather than the last of something

[redcairo]

Hi,

I'm trying to write something and I almost have it... almost...

What I have:

1. This needs to be bolded. The rest does not. There may be several. Sentences, that is.

What I need to end up

1. <p><b>This needs to be bolded.</b> The rest does not. There may be several. Sentences, that is.</p>

Searching: ([0-9]+)\. (.*\.) (.*)

replacing with: \1. <p><b>\2</b> \3</p>

got me this:

1. <p><b>This needs to be bolded. The rest does not. There may be several.</b> Sentences, that is.</p>

So it found the LAST period-space, not the first one.

When I tried the search using this: ([0-9]+)\. (.*)\. (.*)
I still got this:

1. <p><b>This needs to be bolded. The rest does not. There may be several</b> Sentences, that is.</p>

So I wondered, how do I get it to STOP at the FIRST period?

([0-9]+)\. ([.*.])(.*)
and
([0-9]+)\. ([.*\.])(.*)

Don't 'find' it. I thought adding the period in brackets after the 'find all' .* would say "go to that char and stop" but apparently not, and 'escaping' it didn't help.

Would appreciate any insight. Must be something obvious I'm missing.

PJ

[ben_josephs]

More powerful regex recognisers than TextPad's support non-greedy repetition operators that match as little as possible rather than as much as possible. Using these recognisers, in the regex
.*?\.
(which will not work in TextPad) the subexpression .*? would match the shortest string that allowed the expression as a whole to match; thus it would match up to the first dot.

But in your case, since there is just one character (dot), rather than a sequence of characters, that should not be matched by the subexpression, you can simply exclude it from the repetition:
[^.]*
So this does what you want:
([0-9]+)\. ([^.]*\.) (.*)

[redcairo]

Oh yeah, that works perfectly. Awesome - and I see what you mean. Thank you so much!