[Geany] Regex replace weirdness

[Colomban Wendling]

Le 29/09/2010 03:31, Lex Trotman a écrit :
> On 29 September 2010 11:24, Colomban Wendling
> <lists.ban at herbesfolles.org> wrote:
>> Le 29/09/2010 03:16, Lex Trotman a écrit :
>>> On 29 September 2010 11:09, Lex Trotman <elextr at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> On 29 September 2010 10:30, Erik de Castro Lopo <mle+tools at mega-nerd.com> wrote:
>>>>> Hi all,
>>>>>
>>>>> I've got a file of C code which for part of the file has an extra
>>>>> single space indent on the left hand side. To fix this I'm trying
>>>>> to do a regex search for "^ " and replace it with "" (ie empty
>>>>> string). Unfortunately, this search/replace removes all space
>>>>> indentation which is not really what I expect.
>>>>>
>>>>> Any clues on getting this right? Is this a bug?
>>>
>>> Actually having a bit of a think, it can't work since after replacing
>>> the first space with nothing it will find another space at the same
>>> place and remove it until it removes all the spaces at the start of
>>> the line before moving on to the next.
>>>
>>> So its working right, just not what you want :-) & I'm not sure how to do it.
>> not sure it is "right" -- it already matched ^, so why match it again?
> 
> Because it has removed the space it matched, the so its position is
> back to the start of the line (which matches ^).
Yes I agree it is a possible understanding of the thing, but I'm not
sure it is "the one".

BTW sed behaves the way Erik wants:
sed 's/^ //g' file
will only remove the first spaces of every lines, even though the option
g is present.

Regards,
Colomban