Double your indentation with regular expressions!
Say you have a code sample where each level of indentation is indented by only one space more than the previous level:
{
"version": "1.0",
"superitem": {
"item": {
"subitem": {
"data": "test"
}
}
}
}
Say you want to change the indentation to be two spaces per level.
And say you want to do this using the regular-expression search-and-replace tool in a text editor, like BBEdit.
How would you go about it?
There may be some cleverer way to do it, but I was reasonably pleased with the semi-kludgy approach I came up with.
Search for the following:
^( ?)( ?)( ?)( ?)( ?)( ?)
(In each pair of parens is a space followed by a question mark.)
Replace-all with:
\1\1\2\2\3\3\4\4\5\5\6\6
This is sadly non-general; it relies on there being no more than six levels of indentation. But for my purposes, it works nicely, and is much better than running a series of search-and-replaces.
(I know I said I wasn't going to blog this week, but this is work-related and took only five minutes to write up.)
