Replace tablespoon/s and teaspoon/s

Question

I'm using BBEdit or Visual Code and I'm not too experienced with regex but would like to do a simple find and replace to all instances of "teaspoon(s)" (as in teaspoon or teaspoons) and "tablespoon(s)" with "tsp" and "tbsp".

replace:

 1 tablespoon sugar
 2 teaspoons salt
 2 tablespoons butter
 3 teaspoons crystal meth

with:

1 tbsp sugar
2 tsp salt
2 tbsp butter
3 tsp crystal meth

The replace search term should encompass all four variants in one go. Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

You can capture the "b" from "table" to do it in one replacement:

search: \bt(?:a(b)le|ea)spoons?\b
replace: t$1sp

$1 is a placeholder for the captured content (the b if any).