Granted, I am not an objective observer, but I have just been testing a new regex feature that's been added in 1.914 (i.e. v2 alpha) and it is a *huge* leap forward. Thought I'd mention it.
Multiple captures in a single match have been available for a while. But now we can access the individual captures from each match. This is a big advantage and allows for much more streamlined commands.
Example: I have media server that stores metadata about my library in xml. Each media file has an ID that the media player needs in order to know which file to play. I obviously want to be able to ask VC to play my media by title.
The library xml data looks like (entirely fake):
<video database>
<video><movieID="4040" type="movie" title="the 4 on the floor film iv" review="Film in which four are on the floor and five and are doing the handjive while six are picking up sticks." year="2014"</video>
<video><movieID="2345" type="movie" title="no no no" review="Very negative film about negativity." year="1955"</video>
</video database>
I want to create payloadXML where the film title is associated with the movie id.
I can use the pattern movieID="(.*?)".*?title="(.*?)"
as we've been able to do for some time in version 1.
{Match.1} then will combine "4040" and "the 4 on the floor film iv".
It's useful that we can initially grab them together, because they're an associated pair. But: For payload xml, what I want is to then be able to separately access and store {Match.1.1} (value) and {Match.1.2} (phrase).
This is now possible in one easy step, whereas before we had to jump through a few hoops, save results as variables and so on.
Since I use regular expressions a lot, I am pretty pleased about this improvement.