How would I go about writing a regular expression to do a find/replace operation in order to add a space after 10 digits of ever number that is 20 digits long?
I have a long list of phone numbers where some of them are accidentally 20 digits long and I need to add a space in between each instance of that.
Edit: I tried \d\d\d\d\d\d\d\d\d\d\d\d\d\d\d\d\d\d\d\d which selects 20 digit numbers, but replacing that with a space will just replace all 20 digits with blank whitespace rather than inserting a space after 10 digits.
I am attempting to do this with Sublime Text on a MacBook Pro.
Best Answer
you need to use Capture groups if you want to perform replacement operations while preserving components of the original string.
your regex would follow something like:
pattern:
"^([\d]{10})([\d]{10})" //two groups of 10replace:
"$1 $2"The parentheses around each pattern for a block of ten, define a capture group. so we are saying, "the first ten digits in group $1, and the second 10 are in group $2". then we just say "print group 1, add a space, and print group 2".
Note that each platform is different in terms of its Regex syntax and replace syntax. many use
$number(like sed), others use\number(like notepad++), so be sure to consult the documentation for your product.