[Qt-creator] Search and replace behavior with respect to case in editor

[Ziller Eike]

On 30.11.2012, at 14:01, Cristian Tibirna <tibirna at kde.org> wrote:

> On Friday 30 November 2012 12:23:53 Harri Pasanen wrote:
>> It would be cool if search and replace would preserve case, in the same
>> way as Emacs does.
>> 
>> So
>> 
>> Search:  testpad
>> Replace: numpad
>> 
>> would produce these replacements:
>> 
>> testpad -> numpad
>> TESTPAD -> NUMPAD
>> Testpad  -> Numpad
> 
> +1
> 
>> 
>> 
>> Bonus points for exceeding Emacs AI in the following cases:
>> 
>> TestPad -> NumPad    (emacs gives Numpad)
>> testPad  -> numPad    (emacs gives numpad)
> 
> +100
> 
> To be noticed that this can be done (in a limited way) with regexps, but 
> having the regular s&r do this automatically is something I had taken for 
> granted with XEmacs and would be a nice (and rather powerful) tool to have.
> 
> Brownie points to Harri for gathering up the energy to write this (I had 
> noticed it since a few years already but never pushed myself all the way 
> through to writing here or in bugreports.qt-project about it).

There's a task for it https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTCREATORBUG-2106

Actually I'd require the case of the replace string (numpad in your case) to decide the camel case situation.

Search: testpad
Replace: foobar
(testpad -> foobar, TESTPAD -> FOOBAR, Testpad -> Foobar, tESTPAD -> fOOBAR,
TestPad -> Foobar, testPad -> foobar, TeStPad -> Foobar, tESTpAD -> foobar)

Search: testpad
Replace: FooBar
(testpad -> foobar, TESTPAD -> FOOBAR, Testpad -> Foobar, tESTPAD -> fOOBAR,
TestPad -> FooBar, testPad -> fooBar, TeStPad -> FooBar, tESTpAD -> fooBar)

I.e. something like
1) all upper/lower case -> all upper/lower case
2) first letter upper/lower case, rest lower/upper case -> first letter upper/lower case, rest lower/upper case
3) other mixed case: first letter upper/lower case -> first letter upper/lower case, rest as specified

Maybe it would also be possible to take the case of the last character into account, to do something like tESTpAD -> fOObAR, but my brain doesn't manage to wrap around that just now (what "tESTpAD" would be replaced with if the replace string is "FooBaR" , and such ;) ). And it sounds a bit pathological to have both tESTpAD and TestPad in your code anyhow.

Br, Eike

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Eike Ziller, Senior Software Engineer - Digia, Qt
 
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