The research of regular expression like the character "\n" does not give any result on a page even if the page contains such characters and the option regular expression is checked.
To reproduce:
This has been check on English Wikipedia and French Wikisource with Firefox browser under Ubuntu.
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open | None | T151671 Find and replace should be able to operate on multiple lines in NWE | |||
| Resolved | matmarex | T188651 Does not find "\n" though existing on page when searching for regular expression in VisualEditor |
Just to confirm, this is your input, right?
Can you clarify what behavior you expect?
\n in regexp mode will search for a literal newline character, and I don't think there are any on this page. Do you expect it to match the paragraph breaks? Or <br /> elements? Or the literal "\n" (backslash followed by 'n') that appears a few times on the page?
Yes this is my input.
Indeed I expect it to match the newline character. The page which trigger the bug discovery was:
https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Darwin_-_Voyage_d%E2%80%99un_naturaliste_autour_du_monde,_trad._Barbier,_1875.djvu/516
Where there are many of them and I was trying to remove them.
The reason for this is because we use "\n" internally as a "replacement character" for anything that is not text when performing the searches, and so it's ignored in the results. We can probably change this. I'm picking it up even though it's "Low" because I just ran into another bug report that would also be solved by this (T184163).
I think this is a simpler special case of T151671. This task is just about literal newline characters when editing visually (displayed on VE surface as "↵"). That one is about line breaks when editing source in NWE, which is actually a lot more difficult because we pretend they are paragraph end/start nodes.
Change 427022 had a related patch set uploaded (by Bartosz Dziewoński; owner: Bartosz Dziewoński):
[VisualEditor/VisualEditor@master] Improve behavior of newlines and non-text content elements in find-and-replace
Change 427022 merged by jenkins-bot:
[VisualEditor/VisualEditor@master] Improve behavior of newlines and non-text content elements in find-and-replace
Change 432608 had a related patch set uploaded (by Jforrester; owner: Jforrester):
[mediawiki/extensions/VisualEditor@master] Update VE core submodule to master (b8c05e38c)
Change 432608 merged by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/extensions/VisualEditor@master] Update VE core submodule to master (b8c05e38c)