Clipped search pattern when reusing recent regex

[garrettm30]

Before I give the recipe, I need explain that in the regex below, I am using \n to stand in for a line break, but unfortunately, \n does not match line breaks in Affinity, but carriage returns. The only way I know to search for a line break in Publisher is with the dropdown, and consequently I can't give you a regex pattern that you can copy from the forum. (That \n is treated as a duplicate of \r is a frequent annoyance to me, and it breaks compatibility with other regex, but that is a tangent to this issue.)

1. Do a regex search for this (but note the above):
   (\s)?\n(\s)?
    
2. Now select the same search from the list of recent searches. 

Result: the first part of the pattern is now dropped:

[walt.farrell]

Seems like it might be Mac-specific, as I don't get that truncation on Windows.

[Old Bruce]

I find that Publisher uses a Unicode 2029 (Paragraph Separator) instead of a carriage return, Unicode 000D or newline (I think) 000A. This is on Mac. The image is from text copied in Publisher and pasted into BBEdit.

[garrettm30]

That's interesting. If that's the case, my opinion on this is that Serif should still make \n work for newlines, even if they have to first swap out the \n in the search string for whatever character they actually use before passing the string on to whatever regex processing they do.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, garrettm30 said:

If that's the case, my opinion on this is that Serif should still make \n work for newlines,

But \n matches paragraph breaks today. If they made it match a line-break then they'd need something else to match the paragraph breaks. And since paragraphs are the usual use for enter/return, it's more appropriate that \n match them than the relatively infrequent line-break, in my opinion.

[garrettm30]

15 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

But \n matches paragraph breaks today. If they made it match a line-break then they'd need something else to match the paragraph breaks.

That "something else" already exists: \r, which already matches paragraph breaks in Affinity as it should and as it does as elsewhere.

For what it is worth, the distinction between \n and \r is understood by InDesign. Not that I want to hold up InDesign as the master reference that Serif must adhere to if it is going to be successful, but it is to say that a lot of users are going to be accustomed to such usage.

But InDesign is not the only software where this works. I am accustomed to it in my own web programming, and notice the quick reference in my favorite regex tool (regex101.com):