Regex to match lines with a specific number of words

[Joost Kremers <joostkremers@fastmail.fm>]

Hi all,

I've been trying to come up with a regex that will match any line containing at
least 30 words in order to kill them from the buffer (preferably with
`kill-matching-lines`, because I need to move the lines to another buffer.)

Frustratingly enough, I have not been successful. Since "word" here can be
interpreted very broadly, I thought this would be easy. Any sequence of
non-whitespace characters surrounded by whitespace can be considered a "word"
(even if it's a number of some special character such as & or #.) So I did this:

\([^[:space:]]+[[:space:]]+\)

This seems to capture a word (in the above sense) plus any following white space
well enough.

But when I try to modify the regex to only match those lines that repeat this
pattern at least 30 times, it fails:

\([^[:space:]]+[[:space:]]+\)\{30,\}

Passing this to `flush-lines` simply deletes everything in the buffer starting
at point, telling me it "[d]eleted 1 matching line", even though (many) more
lines were deleted. Adding ^ and $ around the regex didn't have any effect.

So what am I doing wrong here? 


-- 
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments