Re: How to combine these two regular expressions

[Jambunathan K]

You should provide a human-readable description of what the regexes are
trying to do.  Have you tried:

C-h f regexp-opt RET

Cecil Westerhof <Cecil@decebal.nl> writes:

> I was asked by someone for a regular expression that could combine
> several search patterns, so that a file only needs to be scanned ones
> and not several times. I was partly successful, but I still need two
> passes.
>
> I now have the following code:
>     (defun dcbl-search-heading ()
>       (interactive)
>       (re-search-forward "\\(.
>     \\)\\(
>
>     \\)\\(.+
>     \\)\\(
>     ?.+
>     \\)" nil t)
>       (replace-match "\\1
>     #heading#
>     \\4"))
>
>     (defun dcbl-search-heading2 ()
>       (interactive)
>       (re-search-forward "\\(.
>     \\)\\(
>     \\)\\(.+
>     \\)\\(\\\(.+
>     \\\)+\\)" nil t)
>       (replace-match "\\1
>     #heading#
>     \\4"))
>
> Is there a way to combine those regular expressions to one?
>
> By the way, if the used expressions could be optimised, let me know. I
> do not make them often, thus maybe I do things sub-optimal here.

--