Gedit regular expressions plugin

Install

NOTE: Gedit now has native regular expression search (>= 3.18). Select Find-and-replace from the menu and you can enable regular expressions there.

1. download the correct plugin from https://bitbucket.org/brandizzi/gedit-re-search/wiki/Home
2. extract the contents to gedit plugin directory, typically:
   • ~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins (gedit2)
   • ~/.local/share/gedit/plugins (gedit3)
3. restart gedit
4. in the menu: Edit -> Preferences -> plugins -> enable 'RegEx Search and Replace'
5. now you should have a 'Regular Expression..' -item in the Search menu.

Other gedit plugins

• http://live.gnome.org/Gedit/Plugins

Regular expressions overview

Expression	Matches
\t	tab
\r	carriage return (CR)
\n	newline (LF)
.	any character
[1234abcd]	any of the specified characters
[^1234abcd]	none of the specified characters
[0-9a-zA-Z]	any of the characters within the specified ranges
expr*	'expr' repeats 0 to multiple times
expr+	'expr' repeats 1 to multiple times
expr{n,m}	'expr' repeats n to m times
(expr)	use 'expr' in the replacement with \1 \2 \3 etc
^	start of line
$	end of line

Examples

Replace \r\n with \n

To enforce Unix style end-of-line (EOL).

Find-Replace:

Search	Replace with
\r\n	\n

Remove trailing white-spaces

To further formalize the document.

Search	Replace with
[ \t]{1,99}\n	\n

Remove EOL 1: trailing and leading non-capital letter

To remove fixed line length without removing paragraphs.

Search	Replace with
([a-z,;:])\n{1,9}([a-z])	\1 \2

Search	Replace with
([^"'.,>!?=])\n([a-z"])	\1 \2

Remove EOL 2: leading non-capital letter

To remove fixed line length without removing paragraphs.

Note: an underscore (_) is used here to signify a space.

Search	Replace with
\n{1,9}([a-z])	_\1

Remove EOL 3: trailing non-capital letter

To remove fixed line length without removing paragraphs.

Search	Replace with
([a-z,;:])\n{1,9}	\1_

Remove hyphenation '-' from words

To remove hyphenation after removing fixed line length.

Search	Replace with
([a-z])-\n{1,9}([a-z])	\1\2

Split word with capital letter in the middle

To correct OCR problem: missing space.

Search	Replace with
([a-z,.])([A-Z])	\1 \2

Replace 1 (one) in a non-number with I

To correct OCR problem: I in number.

Search	Replace with
([^0-9])1([^0-9])	\1I\2

Search number > 9

To find page numbers.

Search
[0-9]{2,9}

Regular expressions in Office Libre

You can also use regular expressions in Office Libre. Note that variables are noted with a '$'.

Remove paragraph trailing spaces

Search	Replace with
^(.*) {1,9}$	$1