Match Placeholders

Match placeholders can be used to insert search matches or match counts in the search text or replacement text. For this to work, the option “Expand match placeholders and path placeholders” must have been enabled in the action & results preferences. You can easily insert match placeholders by right-clicking on an edit box on the Action panel and selecting Insert Match Placeholder in the placeholders menu.

Padding

You can add additional specifiers to all of the above placeholders. You can pad the placeholder’s value to a certain length, and control the casing of any letters in its value. The specifiers must appear before the second % sign in the placeholder, separated from the placeholder’s name with a colon. E.g. %MATCH:6L% inserts the match padded with spaces at the left to a length of 6 characters. You can add both padding and case placeholders. %MATCH:U:6L% inserts the padded match converted to upper case.

Padding specifiers start with a number indicating the length, followed by a letter indicating the padding style. The length is the number of characters the placeholder should insert into the regular expression or replacement text. If the length of the placeholder’s value exceeds the requested length, it will be inserted unchanged. It won’t be truncated to fit the length. If the value is shorter, it will be padded according to the padding style you specified.

The L or “left” padding style puts spaces before the placeholder’s value. This style is useful for padding numbers or currency values to line them up in columns. The R or “right” padding style puts spaces after the placeholder’s value. This style is useful for padding words or text to line them up in columns. The C or “center” padding style puts the same number of spaces before and after the placeholder’s value. If an odd number of spaces is needed for padding, one more space will be placed before the value than after it.

The Z or “zero” padding style puts zeros before the placeholder’s value. This style is useful for padding sequence numbers. The A or “alpha” padding style puts letters “a” before the placeholder’s value. This style is useful for padding sequence letters like %MATCHNA%.

Padding style letters are case insensitive, except for the “alpha” style. %matchna:6a% uses lowercase letters, and %MATCHNA:6A% uses uppercase letters.

Examples: Padding replacements and Padding and unpadding CSV files

Case Conversion

Case conversion specifiers consist of a letter only. The specifier letters are case insensitive. Both “U” and “u” convert the placeholder’s value to uppercase. L converts it to lowercase, I to initial caps (first letter in each word capitalized) and F to first cap only (first character in the value capitalized). %MATCH:I% inserts the match formatted as a title, for example.

Example: Capitalize the first letter of each word

Arithmetic

Arithmetic specifiers perform basic arithmetic on the placeholder’s value. This works with any placeholder that, at least prior to padding, represents an integer number. If the placeholder does not represent a number, the arithmetic specifiers are ignored. For placeholders like %MATCH% that can sometimes be numeric and other times not, the arithmetic specifiers are used whenever the placeholder happens to represent an integer.

An arithmetic specifier consists of one or more operator and integer pairs. The operator can be +, -, *, or / to signify addition, subtraction, multiplication, or integer division. It must be followed by a positive integer. Arithmetic specifiers are evaluated strictly from left to right. When %MATCHN% evaluates to 2, %MATCHN:+1*2% evaluates to 6 because 2+1=3 and 3*2=6. Multiplication and division do not take precedence over addition and subtraction. Integer division drops the fractional part of the division’s result, so %MATCHN:/3% evaluates to 0 for the first two matches.