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Textpad 5 kept crashing when searching for a regular expression (that contained .+ several times). After going back to v4 (again...) the same thing happened, only it popped up an alert saying "Recursion too deep; Stack overflowed" or something like that. But I could carry on using the program. It seems to happen on lines that are longer than about 15,000 characters.

What was the regular expression?

Can't remember it exactly, but it was something like:
It's from a text file I created to add data to a database, format is like FIELD||FIELD||FIELD||...

The regex works most of the time but as I said it crashes on very long llines, about 15,000+ characters.

That regex will cause a huge amount of back-tracking on long lines. Each .+ will match to the end of the line and then repeatedly back-track until it finds a || that allows a match to be found. Presumably something is overflowing in there.

In Posix syntax your regex is:
^(.+)\|\|(.+)\|\|(.+)\|\|(.+)\|\|.+SOME TEXT.+$

If there are no |s between the ||s, use this instead:
^([^|]+)\|\|([^|]+)\|\|([^|]+)\|\|([^|]+)\|\|.+SOME TEXT.+$

Okay, thanks for that, worked well, and much more quickly, too.

BTW, is there a non-greedy operator when using the Posix mode? In many programming languages with regex support, you can do things like: Which searches from the beginning and would stop at the first pipe, rather than searching all the way back from the end of the line.

Unfortunately not. There's just one regex engine; it's just the syntax that's different. But non-greedy operators and many other goodies are available in Helios's other product, WildEdit (http://www.textpad.com/products/wildedit/). This is designed "to make the same changes to a set of text files in a folder hierarchy", and uses a far more powerful regular expression engine (Boost: http://www.boost.org/libs/regex/doc/).