regular expression for find replace modification - regex

Question

I wanted to use regular expressions in eclipse to adept code to a software update.
instead of
{$CFG->prefix}example1.xy
the code needs to be:
{example1}.xy
to work.
another example would be:
{$CFG->prefix}example2.foo
>
{example2}.foo
constant parts are : {$CFG->prefix}; .
i tried the following (i used whitespaces to make reading easier):
Find: \{\$CFG-\>prefix\} ([a-z]|[0-9])* \. ([a-z]|[0-9])*
Which will find the requested String. I struggle in replacing it.
i can use ,/1to store the result of the regex and use it in the replacement (right?) but i am not sure how i can modify/manipulate this result.
thanks for any help.

Answer 1

You can try
\{\$CFG-\>prefix\}([a-z0-9]*)\.
and replace with
{\1}.
I am not sure why you do have the whitespaces in your regex, I removed them.
the quantifier * should be inside your group, otherwise you will have only the last matched character in \1 and not the complete word.
Since you don't want to replace the last part, you don't need to match and replace it.

Answer 2

Try the following search and replace :
Find: \{\$CFG->prefix\}([a-z0-9]*)\.([a-z0-9]*)
Replace with : {\1}.\2
Using the above the following :
BECOMES
Here is a quick screen-cast to show this in action.
Changes made to the OP's Find reg-ex
In order to get the above find-replace to work, I had to make the following changes to the OP's find expression :
Removed whitespaces.
Moved the Greedy Match modifier inside the groups : i.e. ([...]*) instead of ([...])*
Corrected the character set : i.e [a-z0-9] instead of [a-z]|[0-9]
Introduced another Group which captures the part after the period. This however is not strictly needed but may be useful in some scenarios.