Search++ (\W)'(\w) regex replace failure

guy038

Hello, @m-andre-z-eckenrode, @coises, @mpheath and All,

@mpheath, you said :

The find pattern of \B'\b and replace with ’ might be safer to use as to using anchors to qualify the match instead of consuming with groups which may need more complex conditional handling.

I totally agree with this statement !

That is why I proposed, in my initial post, this alternate formulation :

FIND (?<=\W)'(?=\w)

REPLACE ’

which do not contain any group !

Indeed, the \B'\b and (?<=\W)'(?=\w) Find regexes are equivalent and a Replace All operation would change this INPUT text, below :


't'e's't' 't'o' 's'e'e' 't'h'e' 'm'a't'c'h'e's'

By this one :


’t'e's't' ’t'o' ’s'e'e' ’t'h'e' ’m'a't'c'h'e's'

In other words, any single quote char, preceded by a non-word char and followed with a word char, is changed into the ’ character ( \x{2019} RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK )

Best Regards,

guy038

M Andre Z Eckenrode

@mpheath & @guy038

Thanks much for the suggestions, though as stated in my other similar topic, which isn’t specific to Search++, I already found and used a working alternate method to achieve what I wanted, and only really started that topic to try to understand why the (\W)'(\w) method did NOT work, while THIS topic is only really to report the aberrant replacements seemingly caused by Search++.

M Andre Z Eckenrode

@Coises

For what it’s worth, I asked my brother, whom I know also uses Notepad++, to indulge me by repeating my Search++ regex experiments on his own computer, and he kindly did so after encountering some initial problems getting Search++ to work at all (see below for details of that). Anyway, he used a fresh portable copy with the latest versions of both, as I have, and reports getting one anomalous replacement while stepping through a text field made up of 11 copies of my recently reported example text. I think that duplicating the problem almost invariably requires many matches and replacement attempts, since it’s so hit or miss for whatever reason.

About my brother’s initial failures to get Search++ to load in his portable copy: His first four or so tries were attempted in different virtual machines on his computer, including the very first one being Windows 11’s built-in “Sandbox”. All of them failed with messages such as “The specified module could not be found” and “Search++.dll is not compatible with the current version of Notepad++”. But when he tried the same set of files on his real machine, it worked. He routinely runs various other programs in virtual machines just fine.

Coises

@M-Andre-Z-Eckenrode said:
For what it’s worth, I asked my brother, whom I know also uses Notepad++, to indulge me by repeating my Search++ regex experiments on his own computer, and he kindly did so after encountering some initial problems getting Search++ to work at all (see below for details of that). Anyway, he used a fresh portable copy with the latest versions of both, as I have, and reports getting one anomalous replacement while stepping through a text field made up of 11 copies of my recently reported example text. I think that duplicating the problem almost invariably requires many matches and replacement attempts, since it’s so hit or miss for whatever reason.

Thank you, and thanks to your brother!

Is he also using 32-bit Notepad++?

About my brother’s initial failures to get Search++ to load in his portable copy: His first four or so tries were attempted in different virtual machines on his computer, including the very first one being Windows 11’s built-in “Sandbox”. All of them failed with messages such as “The specified module could not be found” and “Search++.dll is not compatible with the current version of Notepad++”. But when he tried the same set of files on his real machine, it worked. He routinely runs various other programs in virtual machines just fine.

I just tried the same thing in Windows 10 Sandbox on my system and it also failed, with the same message. I will have to investigate that. Off the top of my head, I don’t know why that would happen. My guess (that’s all it is for now) is there’s some sort of C++ runtime dependency that nearly everyone has installed on their main machines, but that doesn’t carry over automatically to a virtual machine or a sandbox.

M Andre Z Eckenrode

@Coises said:

Is he also using 32-bit Notepad++?

His routinely-used copy is v8.9.3 x64 portable.

Coises

@M-Andre-Z-Eckenrode said:

About my brother’s initial failures to get Search++ to load in his portable copy: His first four or so tries were attempted in different virtual machines on his computer, including the very first one being Windows 11’s built-in “Sandbox”. All of them failed with messages such as “The specified module could not be found” and “Search++.dll is not compatible with the current version of Notepad++”. But when he tried the same set of files on his real machine, it worked.

At least I was able to figure out the cause of this problem. The ICU (International Components for Unicode) libraries that I use require a specific Microsoft redistributable library. I never noticed, and most people probably have it installed already as part of installing something else, just as I do. It doesn’t automatically carry over to virtual machines or sandboxes, though.

There are a couple potential solutions (and if nothing else works out, I can at least explain in the readme how to install the redistributable). Thank you for reporting this.

M Andre Z Eckenrode

@Coises said:

At least I was able to figure out the cause of this problem.

Glad to hear that worked out.

@Coises said:

Have you ever noticed arbitrary junk character replacements with any other regular expression / replacement pairs, or only with this particular one?

I just tried a somewhat different regex experiment. I copied a list of words beginning with the letter a from a web page and pasted them into N++, then utilized Find (\W)a(\w) and Replace \1z\2 and stepped through. Out of 221 words, 21 replacements resulted in letters other than z being substituted for a. In a few cases, there was a letter other than z, followed by z itself, and followed again by another non-z letter. In a few other cases, extra line breaks were inserted mid-word. Note that in this experiment, no dashes (-) were inserted, as they often were in my previous experiments involving ' and ’. Presumably, that’s some sort of clue.

M Andre Z Eckenrode

@Coises

And just now tried Find (\w)a(\w) and Replace \1z\2 with the same list of words, which definitely resulted in at least one anomalous replacement (average became avevzie), possibly more, but the mistakes are more difficult to spot at a glance in this case.

Coises

@M-Andre-Z-Eckenrode said:

@Coises

And just now tried Find (\w)a(\w) and Replace \1z\2 with the same list of words, which definitely resulted in at least one anomalous replacement (average became avevzie), possibly more, but the mistakes are more difficult to spot at a glance in this case.

I hate continuing to bother you about this with different questions, but I am so stumped. Have you noticed:

Do bad substitutions happen if the document is set as UTF-8, or is it specific to ANSI? (For a test, just use Encoding | Convert to UTF-8 on a document containing your test text before trying to Replace.)
Have you ever seen a bad replacement where the replacement string did not use a capturing group reference (like \1 or \2 or $1 or $2)?

M Andre Z Eckenrode

@Coises said:

Do bad substitutions happen if the document is set as UTF-8, or is it specific to ANSI?

I’ve experienced it with both at this point.

Have you ever seen a bad replacement where the replacement string did not use a capturing group reference

Not that I’ve noticed so far.

New test:

I used the same list of words, but inserted the number 2 between the second and third letters of all words that consisted of at least three letters, then stepped through using Find ([a-z])\d([a-z]) and Replace \1\2. There are anomalies. Examples include:

ac2ademic became adjdemic

ad2ministration became a
ginistration