Problem with RegEx Replace

Hi Mike,

This sort of regex seems to work for me:

\b+([^ \n]+).+

Note that I added the \n in the character class. 

Yes that works so I have forwarded it to my customer.

However I dont understand why adding \n to the 'not a space' would matter in this specific example. Since we are looking for the first space after the first word this should only be required if the first word is immediately followed by a 'new line' character... which it never is in the example.

Hi Mike,

A "[^ ]+" will consume all non-space characters, including newlines.  That's why it will match forward.

OK. That's what I thought, but since the first word on every line is followed by a space character it should never reach those line end characters in the part of the pattern that is within parens.

Surely the part that should exclude the line end is the final .+ which is why we first tried adding a $ to the end so that it would match the line end. The original pattern seems to correctly stop at the line end, but then it replaces everything on the second line except for the line end character itself. (and every second line.) 

Also, someone at Acrtipro had told me that your RegEx Find/Replace was designed to work the same as the one in Visual Studio, and our original pattern works correctly in VS.

Hi Mike,

This sort of pattern also works (line start, consume spaces, match non-space sequence, consume rest of line to end):

^ [ ]* ([^ ])+ .+ $

Let me explain in more detail how the  \b was causing problems.  After the first replace, the pointer is after the "1".  It sees a word boundary with the \n right after, which is a zero-width assertion.  Then it matches a sequence of non-space, which is the \n character.  Then the next character is a space so it skips to the .+ part, which consumes to the end of the line.

Our engine uses a large subset of the .NET regex engine (not VS) syntax, so it should generally be on par with results from that engine.  There may be a couple very minor differences though depending on modes used in the .NET regex engine.

OK I guess the response I got to an earlier question - saying that VS was your model - was incorrect.

I pointed out to the customer that \b was not something I would normally expect someone to use and they admitted that they had used \b thinking 'blank'. ie. they meant to use \s.

Unfortunately they have run into enough unexpected results that they now perform RegEx replaces by copying the code to Notepad++, making the change there, and then copying it back.
(Notepad++ always seems to work the same as VS in the 'problem' scenarios I have checked.)