"CodeSponge" wrote...
....
For some reason when you are referring to a submatch in the replacment
pattern for a VB regular expression instead of using the \1 format you
have to use the $1 format.
personaly I think this is dumb but who am I to judge ;)

so if my search pattern is:
"(\s)ks ?#?(\d*)(\s)"

then my replacement pattern should be:
"$1KS $2$3"

You're suffering from sed-think. While perl supports \<digit backreferences
in the RHS of s///, man perlre(1) is clear that $<number is preferred. MSFT
seems to have decided to implement only the preferred perl syntax.