The simpler answer is to use the Text > Entab... command. This will generally
do the replace you want although it doesn't strictly follow the replace spaces
only at the start of a line rule. The Text > Detab... command will replace tabs
with spaces.
You can do this with a regular expression as well. First, if you want to find
four of a character you can do "a{4}" rather than "aaaa". And then since you
don't want to replace the tabs at the beginning of the line you can use a
look-behind assertion to make sure you are at the start of a line. The
look-behind assertion (?<=[\r\t])a would match an a only if it occurred
immediately after a return or tab. In order to get spaces which might be the
first characters in the file we need to switch this around (?<![^\r\t])a is a
negative look-behind assertion that does the same thing, but also matches the
start of the file.
Find: (?<![^\r\t]) {4}
Replace: \t
[fletcher]
> On Feb 25, 2016, at 12:05 PM, Brian Porter <bepor...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm trying to find a trick for using the grep-enabled Find/Replace BBEdit to
> convert files that use spaces for indentation to using tabs. Here's an
> example input text snippet:
>
> 1. Item
> a. sub-item
> i. third level
> ii. another third level
> 2. Second Top Level
>
>
> What I'd like to do is replace all sets-of-4-spaces at the beginning of the
> line with a single tab (per each 4-space-set), but it seems like this would
> require being able to count the number of matches and use that in the back
> reference somehow
>
> For example, the following search and replace patterns can be used to replace
> the first set of spaces with a tab, but this pattern must be applied
> repeatedly for every "level" of indent being used in the file:
>
> Find:
> ^(\t*)(\ \ \ \ )
>
> Replace:
> \1\t
>
>
> Ideally I want something like this:
>
> Find:
> ^((\ \ \ \ )+)
>
> Replace:
> \t{countOf(\2 in \1)} # Yes it's wildly invalid; use your imagination. :-P
>
>
> I'm unaware of any mechanism in grep/regex that would allow for this. Am I
> correct in thinking it's impossible? Is there an alternative approach,
> perhaps via Apple/shell script that could get the job done that I'm not
> considering?
>
> Thanks,
> Brian
>
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