# Unexpected behaviour when replacing variations of feat

**URL:** https://community.mp3tag.de/t/unexpected-behaviour-when-replacing-variations-of-feat/44478
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [February 10, 2019, 10:11pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/unexpected-behaviour-when-replacing-variations-of-feat/44478 "2019-02-10T22:11:51Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 4

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### Author: ![ohrenkino](https://community.mp3tag.de/user_avatar/community.mp3tag.de/ohrenkino/32/4843_2.png) [@ohrenkino](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/ohrenkino)
#### Post date: [February 11, 2019, 7:46am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/unexpected-behaviour-when-replacing-variations-of-feat/44478/4 "2019-02-11T07:46:50Z")

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> [@sheepdisease](#):
>
> in my mind I thought it would look for the letters, space and full stop

WIth the exception of the full stop which is a special character for regular expressions it worked absolutely as designed.  
The problem is as follows:  
If you use "regular expressions" it is expected that there is a regular pattern to be treated like "any text followed by a number".  
In your case you simply replace one constant text with another constant text. There is no regular pattern.  
The only problem I see is some kind of laziness to create an action for each pair of search and replace terms and a proper list of fields.  
\_ALL is rather dangerous IMHO as there are albums around that have "Featuring" in the name and I would not want to get them modified by such a routine.  
You say, you chose

> [@sheepdisease](#):
>
> replace (only as whole word selected) with the latter causing no changes at all.

I would like to see the syntay you used for this action. If you entered  
"ft. |f. |featuring |feat "  
as search string, it is absolutely clear that this will hardly ever find any matches as I do not know any title where you find this total string with bar characters in it.  
If you created a single replace action with  
Search string: ft.  
Replace string: feat.  
It would have worked.

If you want to use a regular expression and look at the word only, you would have to supply criteria that tell the expression where a word starts. Is it a space character? A bracket? Punctuation?  
You would have to add these separators to your regular expression which would lead to just as much effort as writing single simple replace actions.  
But hasn't a similar problem been discussed with you already in

> [@Using TAG in actions/combining actions for different tags](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/using-tag-in-actions-combining-actions-for-different-tags/42419/7):
>
> I think I read somewhere that it is recommended to replace a space within any regex with something else to make it clear that it is intended to be a space, can you please tell me what that would be? I can't remember or find anything related. Is it \s?? For example: [#6] T=2 ! Remove Album= F=ALBUM 1= (Album) 2= 3=0 to [#6] T=2 ! Remove Album= F=ALBUM 1=\s?(Album) 2= 3=0 If so, is this correct as an example of what you said to replace the following? [#6] T=2 ! Remove Album= F=ALBUM 1= (Albu…

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