Congratulations AND PowerFind Feature Requests
Posted: 2007-07-09 11:44:52
Congratulations on releasing NW Pro. I've found and reported at least one bug with attribute-sensitive Find/Replace, but the prognosis is good.
A couple things though: Nisus's PowerFind Pro implementation has fallen seriously behind the times in terms of standard regular expression support. At the very least, you should support for positive and negative lookahead/lookbehind. Even in NW Classic, positive lookahead/lookbehind was supported (using different syntax, but with the functionality intact). That is, in modern regex, the (?= ... ), (?<! ... ), (?<= ... ), and (?! ... ). The first two are roughly equivalent to NW Classic' :> and :< operators.
Also, there is no functional \A or \Z for accessing the beginning and end of document, though that can be gotten around more easily. Those are the two biggest ommisions in the current PowerFind, although there are others, which are supported by all the other text processors that handle regular expressions and even Adobe InDesign CS3 (whose regex support is actually superb).
A couple things though: Nisus's PowerFind Pro implementation has fallen seriously behind the times in terms of standard regular expression support. At the very least, you should support for positive and negative lookahead/lookbehind. Even in NW Classic, positive lookahead/lookbehind was supported (using different syntax, but with the functionality intact). That is, in modern regex, the (?= ... ), (?<! ... ), (?<= ... ), and (?! ... ). The first two are roughly equivalent to NW Classic' :> and :< operators.
Also, there is no functional \A or \Z for accessing the beginning and end of document, though that can be gotten around more easily. Those are the two biggest ommisions in the current PowerFind, although there are others, which are supported by all the other text processors that handle regular expressions and even Adobe InDesign CS3 (whose regex support is actually superb).