How do you do a Find and Insert in Notepad++ instead of a replace, while using regular expression?

Question

In Notepad++, how do you Find and Insert (instead of Find and Replace) while using a regular expression as the search criteria?

For non regular expression, you can simply include what you are finding in the replace value, but for regular expression, that won't work. Ideas?

Answer 1

very simple, if you need to add some text to every match of your search you can use backreferences in regular expressions, so for example, you have:

this is a table.

and you want to get "this is a red table", so you do search for:

(this is a)

and replace with (in regular expression mode):

\1 red

also note, that we've used parenthesis in our search. Each set of parens can be accessed in replace with the corresponding \N tag. So you can, for example search for

(this is).*(table)

and replace it with

\1 not a \2

to get "this is not a table"