You're absolutely right about the anchoring, I completely overlooked that.
On some lines, my regex was matching the last letter or the last couple of letters of the first cell instead of the whole cell. s/^([^\t]*)\t... instead of s/([^\t]*)\t... fixes the problem.

In reply to Re^2: Regex search and replace appears to be broken by elef
in thread Regex search and replace appears to be broken by elef

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