grep /regex to do iteration / incrementation

I keep running into situations where I need to have incremented variables but I haven't figured out a way to script that so I end up coding it in by hand which is awful when there are a ton of entires. I found a code on this site that I thought would work but my text editor (TextWragler) did not like it (or I didn't do something right). This was the example:

Initial Contents:   Var22 Var20 Var86 Var30
Search String:      Var*[0-9]
Replace String:     Var%1>49>
Results:    Var50 Var51 Var52 Var53

The replace string just returned as itself.

I'm going to use it to increment something along the lines of:

<span id="x">something</span> <span id="x">else</span> <span id="x">entirely</开发者_JAVA百科span>

the value x should be replaced as x1, x2, x3 or some other "string" + n. It would be ideal if it could recognize and renumber mis-numbered variables like that grep code suggests.

Any idea how I can make this work? Can I not use textWrangler? Thanks

On a side note I'm trying to get better at javascript and I'm really curious as to how I could implement something like this(grep/incrementation of strings) into a javascript?

Not sure what you want, but if you want to apply an (arithmetic or other) operation on say the number part after 'Var', you can do something like that using a delegate function

'Var22 Var20 Var86 Var30'
   .replace(/(Var)(\d+)/g,
            function(a,b,c){return b+(Number(c)+10)}
           ); //=> Var32 Var30 Var96 Var40

In javascript regular expressions the %-sign is $ and the index of matches starts with 1. If you just want to replace the number in 'Var12` with 9, it looks like this:

'Var12'.replace(/(Var)(\d+)/,'$19'); //=> Var9
//     Var (=$1)  ^^^   ^ 1 or more numbers (=$2)

This webpage gives you more information about javascript Regular Expressions