As another example, I had selected text, and the In selection checkbox was not ticked, but when I did a Find All in Current Document, the Find result window said:

(0 hits in 0 selections of 1 searched)

instead of:

(0 hits in 0 files of 1 searched)

So something funky is up with that.

I remember a recent poster in another thread had said that even though he had selected-text, the In selection box would not “enable” for him so that he could tick it. I tend to take that poster a whole lot more seriously now. :-)

if \z works with selection, maybe \A does work too?

A good thought, but no, it doesn’t. :-(

And, to bring it all “full circle”, my original thinking was that I could get there in one step. My original statement in this thread:

Problem statement: Replace (in-selection) all foo to FOO. Then, Replace (in-selection) all bar to BAR. Next, put I am onto the front of the selection.

I started here:

find: (^)|(foo)|(bar)
repl: (?1I am)(?2FOO)|(?3BAR)

Which, obviously doesn’t work because of the ^ usage.

if \z works with selection, maybe \A does work too?

^ won’t work with start-of-selection, but \z will work with end-of-selection

See THIS POSTING, where I said:

with an In selection search, we have to be careful in our thinking about \z being strictly an “end-of-file” thing. In this case it is more of an “end-of-selection” thing. :-)

Using a replacement operation with a selection, how would you simply add some text at its beginning (start of selection), and by “add” I mean simply that, add something and keep what’s there.

I did it above by using .+ and replacing with I am and a space.

[BTW, sharp-eyed readers will note that I screwed up my example because I originally said I wanted to end up with I am FOOBAR but somewhere midstream I changed it to I am BAR. Dammit! I really intended replace-with to be I am ${0}. Well, I guess that isn’t super-important to the point I was trying to make, so…]

But anyway, my first thought was to use ^ to match the start of the selected text. Well, that quickly fails because this only works if start-of-selection was at the start of a line, due to the nature of ^.

But that still leaves the question, IS there a good way to match the start-of-selected-text with a regex for this type of replace-in-sel op?

Interesting. My guess is that it’s just an unintended consequence of the way things are done behind the scenes for replace-all-in-selection.

@Scott-Sumner would likely know, given that many of his commits are in the search/replace realm. You might be able to find him at the gitter-based live support room – he might be able to give you more insight.