Example regexp

[eflanigan00]

Nice package, thanks for putting this together. In your example you use \(\s-*[0-9]+\) I can't get that to work.

What works for me is if I go to group -1 and use \([0-9]+\)

What does the -* do in your example? Is this some negation?

• \s is whitespace
• [0-9]+ is one or more number

Also posting all the steps in your gif as commands would be useful.

[mkcms]

Thanks. It would be helpful if you provided some example text which you're trying to align.

In Emacs regular expressions, \s must be followed by a character and it means "match a character with that syntax". The - character stands for whitespace syntax class. Thus \s-* means "match zero or more characters with whitespace syntax class". See Emacs manual for more information.

[phoenixanimations]

Hi another thanks from me for the package. I believe the above poster is trying to do something like this:

hi 0 
what 1
who 2
how? 3

When using the built in emacs align-regexp you just need to do M-x align-regexp [0-9] RET. Which would result in this:

hi	0 
what	1
who	2
how?	3

This package it appears you have to do \(\s-+\) which matches the whitespace giving the same effect. However if you delete that and put in [0-9] it will not align the numbers. The question is why?

[mkcms]

Hi @phoenixanimations,

The question is why?

When you call align-regexp without a prefix argument, it automatically prepends \(\s-*\) regexp to your expression. With a prefix argument, you have to provide the full regexp. This package also required you to be explicit.

I just pushed a commit which allows you to have the behavior you desire. What you need to do is this:

(setq ialign-implicit-regexp "\\(\s-*\\)")

Doing so will prepend that string to the regexp, if your regexp doesn't have a subgroup expression.

So with this you can align the text like in your example by just using the regexp [0-9]. Hope this solves your issue.

[phoenixanimations]

Oh wow, thank you. That's quite interesting and funny enough I might prefer the more explicit in that case.

Anyway thanks for the speedy response, and that definitely solves my problem.