The substitution string is mostly interpreted as ordinary text except for the special control characters, the octal and hexadecimal escapes and the following character combinations:

\1 ... \9 are backreferences at sub-expressions 1 ... 9 in the match.

Any of the first nine sub-expressions of the match string can be inserted into the replacement string by inserting a “\” followed by a digit from 1 to 9 that represents the string matched by a parenthesized expression within the regular expression. The numbering is left to right.

   Example: A search for "(a)(b)" in the string "abc", followed by a replace "\2\1" results in "bac".

& reference at entire match.

The entire string that was matched by the search operation will be substituted.

   Example: a search for "." in the string "abcd" followed by the replace "&&" doubles every character in the result "aabbccdd".

\U \u to uppercase.

The text inserted by "&" or "\1" ... "\9" is converted to uppercase ("\u" only changes the first character to uppercase).

   Example: A search for "(aa)" in the string "aabb", followed by a replace "\U\1bc" results in the string "AAbcbb".

\L \l to lowercase.

The text inserted by "&" or "\1" ... "\9" is converted to lowercase ("\l" only changes the first character to lowercase).

   Example: A search for "(AA)" with a replace "\l\1bc" in the string "AAbb" results in the string "aAbcbb".

Links to this page

• Regular expressions
• Regular expressions 1. Special characters