Feature request: Regular expressions in Find and Replace

[amaau]

Can you please implement regex in Find and Replace?
It's one of the most useful features in any work with text, and specifically in screenplays it's very helpful.
Thanks!

[dimkanovikov]

Can you provide search cases when you need to search with regular expressions inside the screenplay?

[amaau]

Sure,

In one project I had dates below each scene heading that started on a new day, and at some point needed to extract them.

I'm an editor/producer, I need to find all italic text that the writer left and change it to caps or asterisk, because our company likes strict screenplay formatting.

I need to clean accidental whitespace, or make sure all character names start with a capital letter.

There's a convention to capitalize important props the first time they're mentioned, just like for characters, I need to quickly go through all those props.

I need to fix all transitions that were accidentally marked as actions, or parentheticals accidentally marked as dialogue.

[dimkanovikov]

Hm... and how regular expressions will help you with these tasks?

[amaau]

select all dates written on their own line - "^\d\d.\d\d.\d\d$"
clean some cases of extra spaces - Find " {2,}", Replace " ", Find " +$", Replace ""
find capitalized words - "\W[A-Z]{3,}\W"
find parentheticals in dialog - "(.+)" (combined with option to look in dialog only)

[dimkanovikov]

Huh! Okay, thanks! I need to think about it.