Notepad++ Regex replace - \1 doesn't work?

Question

Just to preface, I have read many of the questions regarding this, but I couldn\'t find an answer (at least in my digging). Feel free to point it out if I did miss it!

Answer 1

\1 references the contents of the first capturing group, which means the first set of parentheses in your search regex. There isn't one in your regex, so \1 has nothing to refer to.

Use \0 if you want to reference the entire match, or add parentheses around the relevant part of the regex.

find: name[A-Z_0-9]+
replace: \0_SUFFIX

will change nameABC into nameABC_SUFFIX.

Using capturing groups, you can do things like

find: name([A-Z_0-9]+)     
replace: \1_SUFFIX

which will replace nameABC with ABC_SUFFIX.