Match beginning of line with Regular Expression

Question

I'm confused about dreamweaver's treatment of the characters
^ and $ (beginning of line, end of line) in regex searches. It
seems that these characters match the beginning of the file, not
the beginning of the various lines in the file. I would expect it
to work the other way around. A search like:
(^.)
should match every line in the file, so that a find/replace
could be performed at the beginning of each line, like this:
HELLO$1
which would add 'HELLO' at the start of each line in the
file.
Instead, this action only matches the first character of the
file, sticks 'HELLO' in front of it, and then quits (or moves on to
the next file). The endline character $ behaves in a similar
fashion, matching only the end of the file, not the end of each
line.
I've searched, and all the literature about regular
expressions in dreamweaver seems to indicate that I'm expecting the
correct behavior:
www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/regular_expressions_03.html
quote:
^ Beginning of input or line ^T matches "T" in "This good
earth" but not in "Uncle Tom's Cabin"
$ End of input or line h$ matches "h" in "teach" but not in
"teacher"
Thanks for any insight, folks.

Answer 1

Hi Winston,
I am still digesting the material from the regular expression book and will take sometime to become proficient with it.
It seems that using groupCount() to eliminate the unwanted text does not work in this case, since all the lines returned the same value. Ie 3 posted earlier. This may be because the patterns are complex and only a few were grouped together. Otherwise, could you provide an example using the string posted as opposed to a hyperthetic one. In the meantime, at least one solution have been found by defining an additional special pattern “\\A[^%].*\\Z”, before combining / intersecting both existing and the new special pattern to get the best of both world. Another approach that should also work is to evaluate the size of String.split() and only accept those lines with a minimum number of tokens.
Anyhow, I have come a crossed another minor stumbling block in the mean time with the following line, where some hidden characters is preventing the existing pattern from reading it:
o;?Mervan Bay 40 Boyde St 7 br t $250,000 X West Park AE
Below is the existing regular expression that works for other lines with the same pattern but not for special hidden characters such as “o;?”:
\\A([A-Z][a-z]*){1,2} [0-9]{0,4}/?[0-9]{0,4}-?[0-9]{0,4} ([A-Z][a-z]*){1,2} St|Rd|Av|Sq|Cl|Pl|Cr|Gr|Dr|Hwy|Pde|Wy|La [0-9] br [h|u|t] \\$\\d+,\\d+|\\$\\d*\\,\\d+,\\d+ ([A-Z][a-z]*){1,}\\ZIs it possible to come up with a regular expression to ignore them so that this line could be picked up? Would also like to know whether I could combine both the special pattern “\\A[^%].*\\Z” with existing one as opposed to using 2 separate patterns altogether?
Many thanks,
Jack