Re: rexexp help needed

[Lennart Borgman]

On Fri, Dec 26, 2008 at 3:20 PM, henry atting
<nspm_01@literaturlatenight.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am trying to build a rexexp that does the following:
> I have a text file where I want to replace
>
>    Medicine:One:Two            €12.00
>
> With
>
>    Medicine                    €12.00
>
> Because I have more than one entry `Medicine' (and they
> differ slightly, something like `Medicine:Three:Four' and
> so on) I have to do it with `quere-replace-regexp'.
> With regexp-builder I found this:
>
>    Medicine:.*[^€.0-9]
>
> This works both in regexp-builder and a scratch buffer, but
> unfortunately not in a file. If applied on a file replace-regexp
> strips everything from the first `:'.

You have to escape the [] with \. That is a bit tricky since you have
to double the escape character. (One for text escaping, one for regexp
char escaping.)