Using the Linter plug-in’s Custom Regex Replacement, I’m trying to add a ~ to any non-whitespace character followed by a an opening quote mark. Here’s my regex:
Replace: \S“
With: &~
The default “gm” is in the middle field. (What does “gm” mean?)
However, it’s replacing the found text with a normal “&” character, rather than the actual “found” text. What am I doing wrong?
gm in RegEx world stands for global and multiline … dixit RegEx101 as I’m no RegEx Expert 
…
RegEx101 is actually very useful when it comes to dealing with RegEx 
.
I mean, you could use it to test out the substitution you’re currently trying to put in place .
(I’m way too unconfident in my “RegEx skills” in this instant to actually make some suggestions 
, I’m sorry)
I don’t understand this line.
Can you also describe the objective and motivation behind what you’re trying to to do?
Because I think you probably want to keep the matched characters, no?
So you’d need to put the match in brackets – like so: (\S") –, then refer to that capture group with $1 (I think Linter uses that backreference method with the dollar sign).
I’m not adding a replacement here until we understand what you want.
Otherwise it’s easy to undo with CTRL+Z after you custom-lint a file.
Thanks! Your suggestion worked and it’s doing what I want now.
Basically, I’m using Linter to fix the way the Mac often puts quote marks in the wrong place when you dictate a quote.
In the past, I’ve used some regex variants where the ampersand character (&) in the “replace with” field keeps the matched characters. Maybe it was just a Mac thing.
Your approach using the backreference method is probably more universal.
Regards,
Russell
The and character is indeed used in regex, but you missed the dollar sign and there is a difference: