The Search using Regular Expression action allows you to search a clipboard, variable, a file (v8+) or some text (v8+) for a regular expression and capture what you find to one or more variables. This can be very useful for splitting apart the contents of a variable.

Note: This RegEx Search returns only the first match in the source text.
If you want to process all matches, you will need to use a For Each Action as Shown in this Example.

Select the source to search to search using the Search pop-up. In all of the RegEx searches, you can choose to search in any one of the following: System Clipboard, Variable, File, Text entered into the Action, and Named Clipboard.

Select whether or not to match the case from the using Regular Expression pop-up. You can also use a RegEx flag at the beginning of the pattern to indicate case insensitive matching: (?i)

Then enter the RegEx pattern to search for in the text area.

Enter the Variable for each the entire Match and each Capture Group you wish to save as a Variable. This output section will auto-expand to present one field for each Capture Group in your RegEx pattern.

For more information, see Capture Groups.

If the search fails (no match), by default (7.1+) the action will abort the macro and notify you of the failure. The destination variables will not be modified. You can turn off aborting the macro and/or notifying you in the gear menu (the destination variables will still not be modified in this case).

1. Use a regular expression to search through a product price list and save only certain parts of it.

If your Source String (data) is:

snippet.text

SKU1234Δ    Widget 1Δ	$12.95

(the “Δ” character is a TAB character)

then you would use a RegEx pattern like:
(SKU\d{4})\h(.+)\h(.+)

To see a detailed explanation, and live editor, see https://regex101.com/r/MQ5FwG/1/.

Save the first and third bracketed items (Capture Groups) to save the SKU number and the price.

To work through a list you would need to include a loop or repeat of some kind.

Which results in:

• See all Actions

• Regular Expressions
• Clipboards

• Extracting substring of a Variable
• Keyboard Maestro Forum topics about Search Variable