How to replace a parentheses at the start of a line in textpad

Question

I know that the character ^ finds a character at the start of a line, but I need to delete a left parentheses at the start of many lines. When I try to do a replace, I receive the following error:

Unmatched marking parenthesis ( or \(. The error occurred while parsing the regular expression: '^(>>>HERE>>>'.

What is the correct syntax when searching for the character ( at the start of a line?

Evan Davis · Accepted Answer · 2015-01-30T17:44:04.407

1

You need to escape the parenthesis with a slash, \(

edited Jan 30 '15 at 17:44

answered Jan 29 '15 at 23:06

Evan Davis

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This does not provide an answer to the question. To critique or request clarification from an author, leave a comment below their post. – Cyclonecode Jan 30 '15 at 01:05
1

@Cyclone maybe I'm just tired, but it looks like OP is getting an error in their search from having an open paren; they should correct this by escaping it with a slash to get a literal `(`. What am I missing? – Evan Davis Jan 30 '15 at 01:59
@DanielHaley ok but OP already has the anchor; they just need to escape the paren. – Evan Davis Jan 30 '15 at 17:43

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 09 '17 at 08:05

Textpad regex is pretty frustrating when you need to match parentheses, as both (-) and \(-\) make matching groups. (Very old versions of Textpad had only \(-\) as capturing markers, as unslashed parentheses were not "special".)

You can get around this by using a character class with one item, the relevant parenthesis. For example, when there's an error in java, a stack trace appears that looks in part like this:

at java.util.Formatter.format(Formatter.java:2455)
at java.lang.String.format(String.java:2940)
at day11$boardWrapper.toString(day11.java:85)

When running code through Textpad, you need a regex to catch the filename and line number. The pattern below captures those in \1 and \2, respectively, allowing me to configure the tool to let me jump directly to the offending line.

at.+[(]([^:]+):([0-9]+)[)]
at.+                         offending function name
    [(]                      (
       (     )               capturing group 1
        [^:]+                anything not a colon (i.e., the filename)
              :              colon
               (      )      capturing group 2
                [0-9]+       digits (line number)
                       [)]   )

How to replace a parentheses at the start of a line in textpad

2 Answers2