VSCode regex find & replace submatch math?

%s@{fileID: \(213[0-9]*\)@\='{fileID: '.(submatch(1)-1900)@ 

I am using this regex search and replace command in vim to subtract a constant from each matching id.

I can do the regex find in VSCode but how can I reference the submatch for maths & replace? submatch(1) does not work in VSCode?

Thanks.

6 Answers

Given a regular expression of (foobar) you can reference the first group using $1 and so on if you have more groups in the replace input field.

To augment Benjamin's answer with an example:

Find Carrots(With)Dip(Are)Yummy Replace Bananas$1Mustard$2Gross Result BananasWithMustardAreGross 

Anything in the parentheses can be a regular expression.

Just to add another example:

I was replacing src attr in img html tags, but i needed to replace only the src and keep any text between the img declaration and src attribute.

I used the find+replace tool (ctrl+h) as in the image:

For beginners, the accepted answer is correct, but a little terse if you're not that familiar with either VSC or Regex.

So, in case this is your first contact with either:

To find and modify text,

1. In the "Find" step, you can use regex with "capturing groups," e.g. I want to find (group1) and (group2), using parentheses. This would find the same text as I want to find group1 and group2, but with the difference that you can then reference group1 and group2 in the next step:

2. In the "Replace" step, you can refer to the capturing groups via $1, $2 etc, so you could change the sentence to I found $1 and $2 having a picnic, which would output I found group1 and group2 having a picnic.

Notes:

• Instead of just a string, anything inside or outside the () can be a regular expression.

• $0 refers to the whole match

In my case $1 was not working, but $0 works fine for my purpose.

In this case I was trying to replace strings with the correct format to translate them in Laravel, I hope this could be useful to someone else because it took me a while to sort it out!

Search: (?<=<div>).*?(?=</div>) Replace: {{ __('$0') }} 

Regex Replace String for Laravel Translation

Another simple example:

Search: Replace: css={css`$1`} 

Useful for converting HTML to JSX with emotion/css!