| Tip 85 | Create Complex Patterns by Iterating upon Search History |
Writing regular expressions is hard. We won’t get it right the first time, so the next best thing is to develop a frictionless workflow that allows us to develop a pattern by iteration. Being able to recall and edit previous items from our search history is the trick.
In this example text, the prime symbol has been used as a quote mark:
| | This string contains a 'quoted' word. |
| | This string contains 'two' quoted 'words.' |
| | This 'string doesn't make things easy.' |
We want to compose a regular expression to match each quoted string. This will take a few tries, but when we get it right, we’ll run a substitute command to transform the text to use real double-quote ...
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