Last modified: 2014-04-08 08:59:08 UTC
I have recently started using the regex feature in the Edit Toolbar's Search and Replace. I have been unable to get a regex using a lookahead to successfully replace the text. As an example, here - http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Sillyfolkboy/Resources/Ath_Sandbox_1&action=edit Using "\d (?=\w)" successfully finds all the lines starting with a digit and three spaces (followed by a letter). When I click "replace all" I'm told that 123 replacements have been made, but no text is replaced. Clicking find next, then replace all tells me that 123 replacements have been made again. The replace function seems to fail when a lookaround is included in the search. This may be just a learning issue for myself given the lack of documentation (see https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23626) but what I'm doing works on http://www.regextester.com/ which ostensibly should be doing the same thing as Wikipedia's search and replace.
What browser are you using? Not all browsers support the same features, so it could be UA-specific. The problem seems to be with the replace, as find works.
It doesn't seem to be a problem of the browser replace, this works: "10 W".replace(/\d+ (?=\w)/, "Foo ");
I'm using firefox 21 - just upgraded and the problem persists from version 20. I've downloaded the latest Google Chrome (26) and that produces the same issue.
Downloaded and tried on IE9 and the search and replace button in the toolbar isn't even working!
(In reply to comment #4) > Downloaded and tried on IE9 and the search and replace button in the toolbar > isn't even working! See: Bug 48305 - 1.22wmf3, "Search and replace" capability not working in IE/Opera: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48305#c9 Bug 23992 - Search&replace disabled in IE8, Opera: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23992
