Simon Willison’s Weblog

UltraEdit regular expressions

23rd March 2003

Every now and then I find myself needing to use a regular expression in UltraEdit, and whenever I do I invariably have to spend five minutes re-reading that section of the manual to remind myself how its syntax differs from more traditional regular expressions. This time, I’m recording the result in the hope that it might jog my memory next time I need to use them.

The task completed by this regular expression is to turn a file containing numbers like this:

1st
2nd
3rd
...

In to this:

<option value="1">1st</option>
<option value="2">2nd</option>
<option value="3">3rd</option>

Find: %^([0-9]+^)^(?+^)$ and Replace with: <option value="^1">^1^2</option>