This might be the wrong time of night for doing regex (i.e., my mistake), or my trusty Vedit text editor has a bug in its regex implementation.
Original search string: ^(From AncientBBS[1-2])\s+(Sun|Mon|Tue|Wed|Thu|Fri|Sat)[\s\,]+(Jan|Feb|Mar|Apr|May|Jun|Jul|Aug|Sep|Oct|Nov|Dec)\s+([0-9][0-9]|\s[0-9])[\s\,]+(19[0-9][0-9])[\s\,]+([0-9][0-9]\:[0-9][0-9]\:[0-9][0-9])\s*$
Replacement string: <Nah, skip it>
The above search string gives a syntax error. I am a bit suspicious of the
([0-9][0-9]|\s[0-9]) group re operator precedence of the "or", and proceeded to stepwise simplification to narrow it down. I finally got down to:
Search string: (Jan|Feb|Mar|Apr|May|Jun|Jul|Aug|Sep|Oct|Nov|Dec)\s+([0-9])[\s\,]+
Replacement string:
\1\s0\2\s
The new search works fine (as did some of the previous
stepwise simplified ones), but the replacements are baffling me.
The line
From AncientBBS1 Thu Jan 2, 1986 20:50:00
gets changed to
From AncientBBS1 Thu 02 1986 20:50:00
I.e., the variable \1 seems to get lost. In my previous stepwise simplified cases, multiple variables got lost when the search worked at all.
Why am I doing this? I need to massage some old BBS messages into the retarded mbox format, whose date format (on the "From " line) of "Tue Nov 05 19:02:00 1985" is particularly illogical. Be that as it may, The two sources of these messages I am processing had further sloppiness in their dates, done by some ancient BBS bozos. I did successfully fix a lot of that already with regex.
Hartmut W Sager - Tel +1-204-339-8331