Question

I’m looking to do search replace with regular expressions in Sublime Text 2. The documentation on this is rather anemic. Specifically, I want to do a replace on groups, so something like converting this text:

Hello my name is bob

And this search term:

Find what: my name is (\w)+

Replace with: my name used to be $(1)

The search term works just fine but I can’t figure out a way to actually do a replace using the regexp group.

Answer 1

Usually a back-reference is either $1 or \1 (backslash one) for the first capture group (the first match of a pattern in parentheses), and indeed Sublime supports both syntaxes. So try:

my name used to be \1

or

my name used to be $1

Also note that your original capture pattern:

my name is (\w)+

is incorrect and will only capture the final letter of the name rather than the whole name. You should use the following pattern to capture all of the letters of the name:

my name is (\w+)