As I said: these are generally not things that a programmer needs to do on their code, therefore there is no function to achieve this. Your right: F5 is all you have.

With something like Vim, you could pipe the text to some Perl program to handle that kind of thing for you.

Take a look at Advanced->Tool configuration. This does what you want - you can open a "pipe" to Perl.

Example of my favourite: I created one called "Perl debug", defined as "perl -d %F", and bound it to ctrl-D. Whenever I want to debug the file I am editing, crtl-D will launch a debug session. "perl -de 0" is another good one.

This approach could be used for your regexs. Remember to tick the 'Save active file' box. The tokens %modify% (to query for custom args to your command so you could define a new regex each time) - and %sel% (to pass the selected text to the command) are particularly relevant, in your case.

I didn't mean to insult anyone ... I'm sorry if you somehow found this offensive.

Relax, I am not offended :-). Just trying to convince you that UE should not be abandoned so easily, and you do not need to look elsewhere.

But more generally, I am making the point that most people do not take the time to examine the full feature set of the tools available to them; almost always to their detriment.