I appreciate what I'm asking may be very simple to more experienced folks. I've spent several hours trying to get my head around RegEx and have gotten close to what I need, but as this is something I'm trying to achieve for a hobby project (RegEx is not something I require in my day job) I'm hoping some of you may be able to help me out.
In short, I have a very large file with tens of thousands of lines of code that I am converting to be readable by another program. All I need to accomplish this is to change some formatting.
I need to find every instance where the tag "{#graphic examplename}" is used, and change it so that only "examplename" remains in square [[ ]] brackets.
Examples of how the tags currently appear (example names can be either single words or multiple):
"{#graphic example1}",
"{#graphic example2}",
"{#graphic example3 with multiple words}"
What I want them to look like when done, replacing the { with [[, removing #graphic, and replacing } with ]].
"[[example1]]",
"[[example2]]",
"[[example3 with multiple words]]"
It's easy enough to do a simple find-and-replace to replace "{#graphic " with "[[", as the #graphic tag is something I want to remove universally however the issue I'm running into is that I can't replicate that with the "}" at the end, because I can't find a way to specify that I only want to replace examples of "}" that come after an instance of "{#graphic " while leaving any other words (the examplename) intact.
Any assistance gratefully received - if the above needs any elaboration please don't hesitate to ask, I understand I may be putting this in amateurish terms.
Regards,
K
Often programs have a way of capturing groups and referencing them later, often with $
so find {#graphic ([^}]+)}
replace [[$1]]
Captures what is inside the () and makes it available in the replace as $1, i.e. the first "capture group".
Regex 101 is an excellent resource for trying these things out:
https://regex101.com/r/r5OX8I/1
Related
I have several of text files that contain the something like the following on many different lines:
this_is_THIS.doc
What I need to accomplish is to replace THIS with different objects for the first 5 occurrences and disregard the rest.
I would like for it to appear like the following:
this_is_TREE.doc
this_is_CAR.doc
this_is_CAT.doc
this_is_DONKEY.doc
this_is_ROCK.doc
I will have to do this many times in the future with the words changing so I feel a regex that I can alter in the future would help me a lot. I have searched but found nothing useful. Thanks for any help, you folks are great here.
As long as you want to replace just 5 instances of THIS, I think the following solution is manageable. For this particular case, you can replace:
^(.+?)THIS(.+?)THIS(.+?)THIS(.+?)THIS(.+?)THIS
With
$1TREE$2CAR$3CAT$4DONKEY$5ROCK
Change the above texts like CAT, CAR as per your requirements.
Click for Demo
Before Replacing:
Don't forget to check . matches newline and Match case settings as shown below.
After Replacing:
Note: Even I wouldn't recommend this method if you need to replace say 100 instances of THIS. The regex is going to be too long in that case.
I have a specific case where I somehow can't find something that suits my need. I've always been struggling when parenthesis comes in strong, and this case is a bit painful. I'm trying to collect the most of a text field to fit it in a more controlled database, and there's a few tricks I'm fumbling in.
There is ONE thing that is always the case for every row entered;
serie of character + ( + text + )
Basically, here's what it could look like:
1111111E (CARRIER), 2222222, 33333 (CARRIER2) 44444 (CARRIER 3)
My goal is to get:
1111111E (CARRIER)
2222222, 33333 (CARRIER2)
44444 (CARRIER 3)
And if I can ever manage to get a hold of commas and space to split the few like the middle one, that would be just amazing.
I'm struggling through a few REGEX tester website as I'm writing this, starting from scratch over and over again.
If some regex gurus are around, you're a welcome hand !
If it has to be RegEx you could split at
(?<=\))[, ]*
Note that as you don't want to take out the ")" you must not match it and thus the statement uses a look behind which does not work in all RegEx engines.
[^\s|\,].*?\s\(.*?\)
With a Match All is doing the expected result. I doubt it's the most optimal regex I could type in, but it seems to be working fine.
I could try to work around the second case to wrap it up, but I think I'll take care of these case in my code.
Leaving the answer up for anybody who could be looking into something similar.
I've been searching a lot in the web and in here but I can't find a solution to this.
I have to make two replacements in all registry paths saved in a text file as follows:
replace all asterisc with: [#42]
replace all single backslashes with two.
I already have two expressions that do this right:
1st case:
Find: (\*) - Replace: \[#42\]
2nd case:
Find: ([^\\])(\\)([^\\]) - Replace: $1$2\\$3
Now, all I want is to join them together into just one expression so that I can do run this in one time only.
I'm using Notepad++ 6.5.1 in Windows 7 (64 bits).
Example line in which I want this to work (I include backslashes but i don't know if they will appear right in the html):
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Classes\*\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\
I already tried separating it with a pipe, like I do in Jscript (WSH), but it doesn't work here. I also tried a lot of other things but none worked.
Any help?
Thanks!
Edit: I have put all the backslashes right, but the page html seem to be "eating" some of them!
Edit2: Someone reedited my text to include an accent that doesn't remove the backslashes, so the expressions went wrong again. But I got it and fixed it. ;-)
Sorry, but this was my first post here. :)
As everyone else already mentioned this is not possible.
But, you can achieve what you want in Notepad++ by using a Macro.
Go to "Macro" > "Start Recording" menu, apply those two search and replace regular expressions, press "Stop Recording", then "Save Current Recorded Macro", there give it a name, assign a shortcut, and you are done. You now can reuse the same replacements whenever you want with one shortcut.
Since your replacement strings are totally different and use data that come not from any capture (i.e. [#42]), you can't.
Keep in mind that replacement strings are only masks, and can not contain any conditional content.
We have a large solution with many projects in it, and throughout the project in forms, messages, etc we have a reference to a company name. For years this company name has been the same, so it wasn't planned for it to change, but now it has.
The application is specific to one state in the US, so localizations/string resource files were never considered or used.
A quick Find All instances of the word pulled up 1309 lines, but we only need to change lines that actually end up being displayed to the user (button text, message text, etc).
Code can be refactored later to make it more readable when we have time to ensure nothing breaks, but for time being we're attempting to find all visible instances and replace them.
Is there any way to easily find these "instances"? Perhaps a type of Regex that can be used in the Find All functionality in Visual Studio to only pull out the word when it's wrapped inside quotes?
Before I go down the rabbit hole of trying to make my job easier and spending far more time than it would have taken to just go line by line, figured I would see if anyone has done something like this before and has a solution.
You can give this a try. (I hope your code is under source control!)
Foobar{[^"]*"([^"]*"[^"]*")*[^"]*}$
And replace with
NewFoobar\1
Explanation
Foobar the name you are searching for
[^"]*" a workaround for the missing non greedy modifier. [^"] means match anything but " that means this matches anything till the first ".
([^"]*"[^"]*")* To ensure that you are matching only inside quotes. This ensures that there are only complete sets of quotes following.
[^"]* ensures that there is no quote anymore till the end of the line $
{} the curly braces buts all this stuff following your companies name into a capturing group, you can refer to it using \1
The VS regex capability is quite stripped down. It perhaps represents 20% of what can be done with full-powered regular expressions. It won't be sufficient for your needs. For example, one way to solve this quote-delimited problem is to use non-greedy matching, which VS regex does not support.
If I were in your shoes, I would write a perl script or a C# assembly that runs outside of Visual Studio, and simply races through all files (having a particular file extension) and fixes everything. Then reload into Visual Studio, and you are done. Well, if all went well with the regex anway.
Ultimately what you really must watch out for is code like this:
Log.WriteLine("Hello " + m_CompanyName + " There");
In this case, regex will think that "m_CompanyName" appears between two quotes - but it is not what you meant. In this case you need even more sophistication, and I think you'll find the answer with a special .net regular expression extension.
I'm trying to write some Perl to convert some HTML-based text over to MediaWiki format and hit the following problem: I want to search and replace within a delimited subsection of some text and wondered if anyone knew of a neat way to do it. My input stream is something like:
Please mail support. if you want some help.
and I want to change Please help and Please can some one help me out here to Please%20help and Please%20can%20some%20one%20help%20me%20out%20here respectively, without changing any of the other spaces on the line.
Naturally, I also need to be able to cope with more than one such link on a line so splicing isn't such a good option.
I've taken a good look round Perl tutorial sites (it's not my first language) but didn't come across anything like this as an example. Can anyone advise an elegant way of doing this?
Your task has two parts. Find and replace the mailto URIs - use a HTML parsing module for that. This topic is covered thoroughly on Stack Overflow.
The other part is to canonicalise the URI. The module URI is suitable for this purpose.
use URI::mailto;
my #hrefs = ('mailto:help#myco.com&Subject=Please help&Body=Please can some one help me out here');
print URI::mailto->new($_)->as_string for #hrefs;
__END__
mailto:help#myco.com&Subject=Please%20help&Body=Please%20can%20some%20one%20help%20me%20out%20here
Why dont you just search for the "Body=" tag until the quotes and replace every space with %20.
I would not even use regular expresions for that since I dont find them useful for anything except mass changes where everything on the line is changes.
A simple loop might be the best solution.