NetBeans supports regular expressions for searching and replacing text in the editor. In my last project I had to replace a bit of HTML code with an array. Here is the source HTML code:
<option value="/en/gb/overview.html">United Kingdom</option> <option value="/en/us/overview.html">United States</option> <option value="/en/ca/overview.html">Canada</option> <option value="/nl/nl/overview.html">The Netherlands</option> <option value="/nl/be/overview.html">Belgium (Dutch)</option>
And this needed to be changed to the following code:
locales["gb_en"] = "index_en_gb.html" locales["us_en"] = "index_en_us.html" locales["ca_en"] = "index_en_ca.html" locales["nl_nl"] = "index_nl_nl.html" locales["be_nl"] = "index_nl_be.html"
I started out by changing each line, but then I realized I was doing the same thing over and over again (the real list was much bigger than the one in this example). There must be a better way and in NetBeans there is!
We go to Edit | Replace. NetBeans shows the Replace dialog window. In the Find What field we type the following regular expression: ^<option value="/(.*)/(.*)/overview.html">.*</option>. Notice we define 2 groups between the parenthesis. We use these in the Replace With field where we type locales["$2_$1"] = "index_$1_$2.html". We are almost done, we only must check Regular Expressions and click on the Replace All button.
