By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: June 13, 2015
As a quick note, you can do a search-and-replace operation in TextMate using regular expression patterns as follows. First, create a find pattern like this, putting the capture group in between parentheses:
<h2 id="toc_.*">(.*)</h2>
Then create a “replace” pattern like this, using $1 as the variable for the first capture group:
<h2>$1</h2>
On the TextMate search and replace UI you also need to select the “regular expression” checkbox.
In the case of this example I was deleting a bunch of “cruft” that was generated by MacDown when I converting some Markdown text to HTML, but of course you can use this technique for any sort of search/replace/pattern/regex problem in TextMate.