@Coises said:
I didn’t think to mention that quirk. If you start with a rectangular selection, Columns++ searches each row independently
Aha. That explains my own confusion. That was actually the first time I’d used the Search feature of Columns++. For the record, any time I’m doing regex search & replace in NPP that either turns out to be more complicated than I expected, or involves some trial and error, or which I’m going to want to utilize again elsewhere (such as this topic), I’m in the habit of typing it out right in the text document I’m working on, and then I select/copy the replacement regex, then select the find regex and open the necessary dialog, expecting the Find what to have been automatically populated from my most recent selection (which, of course, didn’t happen in that case). It didn’t occur to me that that wouldn’t work in Columns++. So, when I opened Columns++’s Search dialog with only the content of one line selected and tried to perform my regex search, it threw this at me:
This command requires a rectangular selection. Extend selection to the last line of the document?
And, Columns++ Search neophyte that I am, I didn’t heed the suggestion. I closed the dialog and created a rectangular selection.
Now that I’ve been made aware of the error of my ways, I’ve redone the experiment with all the my example text selected, and all instances of ' were successfully replaced with ’, without any anomalies.
