Inserting a space between a dot and a character using simple search/replace with regular expressions
regex, replace
Solution
You could use back references in the replace string. Typically it would look something like:
Search regex:
(\.)(\w)
Replacement pattern (notice the space):
$1 $2
The back references are stand-ins for the corresponding groups.
Alternatively, you could use lookarounds:
(?<=\.)(?=\w)
This doesn't "capture" the text, it would only match the position between the period and the letter/number (a zero-length string). Replacing it would, essentially, insert some text.
Really, though, it depends on the capabilities of your text editor. Very few text editors have a "complete" regular expression engine built-in. I use TextPad which has its own flavor of regular expression which largely does not support lookarounds (forcing me to use the first approach).
Problem
I want to separate sentences by inserting a space between each period and letter but not between anything else like a dot and a bracket or a dot and a comma. Consider this: ``` This is a text.With some dots.Between words.(how lovely). ``` This probably has some solution in Perl or PHP but what I'm interested in is can it be done in a text editor that supports search/replace based on regexes? The problem is that it would match both the dot and the character and replace will completely obliterate both. In other words, is there a way to match "nothing" between those two characters?