Re: RFE: Regular expression scan AND replace

On 4/14/2016 6:05 PM, John Yeung wrote:

I consider myself a light-to-moderate regex user, and I have almost
never used backrefs. For the example you presented in your RFE, my
first thought was "Can I do multiline regexes, because if I can, then
I can try to match on single newlines, skipping pairs of newlines, and
replace them all with space, plus-sign, newline." My second thought
was "If I can't do multiline regexes in the editor, then it's probably
time for me to just write a simple Python script that I will use
whenever I want to CLP-ify *any* of my SQL scripts." ;)

In light of Vern's message, does this mean you're going to withdraw
your request? Or maybe request that the syntax be modified to allow
backslash as well as dollar sign for backrefs?

I added a comment that the docs need to be updated.

However.

Multi-line regexes don't work either. Maybe I need to pull the first
RFE and create a second. I'll see what the IBM team think when they get
to it.

I'm not averse to using Python to transform a script, but I tend to have
multiple functional blocks in a single text file, so I don't want to
convert the whole thing in one go - I only want to convert selected
lines. Else I'd use awk. Or sed.

I don't want to come across as a complainer - I only want the community
to tell IBM whether my personal wish list is something IBM should spend
time on :-) The best way to do that is by creating an RFE. If the
community likes the idea, it'll get voted up. If not, well there's
always N++ for those niggling things :-)