Google Apps Hacks

38 GOOGLE APPS HACKS

and hyphens without a period (a top-level domain name such as com, edu, or net). So this

regular expression would match www.oreilly.com, using the following steps:

www.

oreilly.

com

As you’ve seen earlier, the $1 refers to the group matched by the rst (in this case, outer) set of

parentheses. The inner set of parentheses could be referred to by $2, but it’s not needed because

it’s a subset of what you’re interested in.

Note that when matching hyphens, the - needs to come at the beginning of the [ ] group or be

escaped with \ because it has special meaning within [ and ], as you saw in “Replacing obfuscated

email addresses with real ones.”



Sometimes you want to replace not just within the visible text, but also within the underlying HTML

source. However when you switch to the HTML mode for a document, the Edit→Find and replace

menu disappears. But you can work around this limitation by using a bookmarklet, a browser

bookmark containing JavaScript. JavaScript also natively supports regular expressions.

First, create a new bookmarklet as described in . The basic JavaScript needed for this is

the following replacement function, where “a” is the (regular expression–based) string to nd, and “b”

the string to replace with:

javascript:(function(){

var ta = document.getElementById("wys_textarea");

ta.value =ta.value.replace("a", "b");

})()

To ex