GREP query to change space to tab

[jay fresno]

There are many paragraphs and at the beginning of each paragraph, there are one or two characters (they could be letters or numbers or a period) followed by a space, an = sign and a space, and then any number of more characters.

I need to change the space to tabs.

For example the original text has a space character before and after the =

AB = Blah blah blah

needs to change to this where there is a tab character before and after the =

AB     =     Blah blah blah

Anyone know a GREP find/change query for this?

[jay fresno]

I also need a GREP query to change multiple spaces to a single tab character.

For example: with multiple spaces after the A period:

A.   Blah blah blah

need to change to a single tab instead of multiple spaces after the A.

A.     Blah blah blah

The letter would not necessarily be an 'A', it could be any letter.

[Jongware · Accepted solution]

For 1:

^[\w.]+\K *= *

replace with \t=\t

This looks for any sequence of letters or numbers (\w, "word" characters, which include uppercase and lowercase as well as digits, and the underscore for historical reasons) or a period at the start of a paragraph, then discards what it found. It then matches zero or more spaces, the equals, and optionally more spaces. This latter part gets replaced with a tab, equals, tab.

For 2:

^[\u\l]\.\K +

replace with a single tab. This looks for 'any letter' (one of uppercase or lowercase), followed by a period. Then it discards this, matches any positive number of spaces, and these get replaced with your tab again.

I used the fairly new addition "\K" in both expressions because the alternative is to construct elaborate lookbehind expressions -- quite basic for #2, but barely doable for #1 (it is do-able but this is so much easier).

[jay fresno]

Thank you for this, Jongware -- you are truly the best!