Turn case sensitivity off in regular expression replacement

Question

Converting a subversion repo to git, and setting up an authors file. I'm running query-replace-regexp on this text:

E001234

using this regexp:

^\(.*\)$ -> \1 = Some Lowercase Text Here <[email protected]>

When I execute the replacement, the replacement text is being capitalized like this, due to the case sensitive nature of replacements:

E001234 = SOME LOWERCASE TEXT HERE <[email protected]>

I understand what's happening, but is there a way to turn this off w/o writing a custom function (trivial, but still...)?

Answer 1

You can set the variable case-replace to nil before executing the command. Then you will get the following replacement

E001234 = Some Lowercase Text Here <[email protected]>

as expected. When case-replace is non-nil it preserves case in replacements, i.e. the case of the replacement matches that of the matched text.

Note, there is also the variable case-fold-search which also affects case in the match and as well as the replacement.