1. Summary of the problem
I have a csv file where I want to replace normal quotes in text with typographic ones.
It was hard (because HTML is also included), but I have meanwhile created a good regex expression that does just the right thing: in three "capturing groups" I find the left and right quotation marks and the text inside. Replacing then is a piece of cake.
2. Regex engine
I can use the regex engine of Notepad++ (boost) or PCRE2 comaptible, for developping and testing purposes I have used https://regex101.com.
3. What I'm having a hard time with and just can't get right, where I need your help is here:
I want to add a sub condition, in order to find the text in quotes only in certain lines, want to identify these lines by the language, e.g. ENGLISH or FRENCH (see also example in the screenshot).
Screenshot of a sample
The string indicating the language is always in the same line before the text to be found, BUT only the text in quotes (main condition) should be marked after matching the sub condition, so that I will be able to replace them.
It is about a few thousand records in the csv file, in the worst case I could also replace it manually. But I'm pretty sure that this should also work via regex.
4. What I have tried
Different approaches with look arounds and non-capturing groups didn't lead me to the desired result - possibly because I didn't really understand how they work.
An example can be found here: https://regex101.com/r/ketwwm/1
The example can be found here, it only contains the regex expression to match and mark the (three) groups WITHOUT the searched subcondition:
("")([^<>]*?)("")(?=(?:[^>]*?(?:<|$)))
Hopefully anyone in the community could help? (Hopefully I have not missed anything, it's my first post here )
5. Update 03/18/2022: Almost resolved with two slightly different approaches (thank you all!) What is still unsolved ..
Solution of #Thefourthbird (see answer 1)
^(?!.?"ENGLISH")[^"]".*(SKIP)(F)|("")([^<>]?)("")(?=(?:[^>]?(?:<|$)))
Nearly perfect, just missing matches in an HTML section. HTML sections in the csv file are always enclosed by double quotes and may have line feeds (LF). https://regex101.com/r/x5shnx/1
Solution of #Wiktor Stribiżew (see in comments below)
^.?"ENGLISH".?\K("")([^<>]?)("")(?=(?:[^>]?(?:<|$)))
The same with matches in HTML sections, see above. Plus: Doesn't match text in double double quotes if more than one such entry occurs within a text. https://regex101.com/r/I4NTdb/1
Screenshot (only to illustrate)
If you want to match multiple occasions, you can use SKIP matching all lines that do not start with FRENCH:
^"(?!FRENCH")[^"]*".*(*SKIP)(*F)|("")([^<>]*?)("")(?=(?:[^>]*?(?:<|$)))
The pattern matches:
^ Start of string
" Match literally
(?!FRENCH") Negative lookhead, assert not FRENCH" directly to the right
[^"]*" Match any char except " and match "
.*(*SKIP)(*F) Match the rest of the line and skip it
| Or
("")([^<>]*?)("")(?=(?:[^>]*?(?:<|$))) Your current pattern
Regex demo
Related
This is a follow-up question to what was solved yesterday:
Notepad++ Regex Replace Makeshift Footnotes format With Proper Markdown format
I managed to find a Regex to remove the offending semicolons in the main text area but by only cutting out the text and pasting back the result, which can only be done one by one.
I'm not sure how this can be done, but the expert can tell me.
So I have footnote references in markdown format. Two instances of the same thing:
[^1]:
[^2]:
.
.
.
[^99]:
I might not have 99 in a document but I wanted to show I need to match two digits here again.
As I said, there are two instances of these numbered references in the text. One in the main text pointing to the footnote and the footnote at the end of the document.
What I need is deleting the semi-colons from the main text and leave the
[^3]:
[^15]:
etc.
references at the end intact.
Because the main text references come after a word or at the end of a sentence (ususally before the sentence-ending period), there is never a case a reference would start a sentence (even if they seem to appear there once or twice because of word wrap).
I provided the exact opposite of my needs here:
Click here for Regex101 website link
I put in the exact opposite of what I want because I already knew of the
^
sign to match anything that is at the front of the line.
Now I would like to negate this, if possible, so that I would delete the semi-colons in the main text, not down at the bottom.
Of course, it is likely that my approach is not good and you'll come up with a completely different approach. Especially because there doesn't seem to be a NOT operator in Regex, if I read correctly.
I repeat: the Regex101 example with the match and substitution is exactly the opposite of what I want.
I am not sure if you can play around in the substitution line to get the desired negative effect.
I could have probably asked for removing the first occurence of semi-colons but I thought the important part of tackling the problem is that those items not to be matched are always at the start of the line, not the others.
Thanks for any suggestions
In Notepad++ you might use a negative lookabehind asserting not the start of the string to the left, and use \K to clear the match buffer matching only the colon that should be replaced by an empty string.
(?<!^)\[\^\d{1,2}]\K:
Explanation
(?<!^) Negative lookbehind, assert not the start of the start directly to the left
\[\^ Match [^
\d{1,2} Match 1 or 2 digits
] Match literally
\K Forget what is matched so far
: Match a colon
Regex demo
I managed to do most of my conversion in VBA Macro (Word > txt) but some changes were made also that I could not forego or get around. Unfortunately, I had not been in the habit of using styles and precise formatting in my docs... (Which is why a PanDoc conversion did not "pan" out well, if you'll excuse the pun.)
In my docs, I was using bold text/lines for in-text titles (not Heading 2 alas) but as I was converting mid-sentence one or two-word bold phrases into phrases to go between double square brackets, the makeshift titles/headings were also changed to [[some title]] format in the process.
With Find and Replace (a batch script that goes through all files in a folder would also do), I would like to search for each and any number of instances of CRLF [[some title CRLF]]CRLF and replace the brackets with ** (to make the title bold), or perhaps ## to make the headings I was missing back in MS Word (I would of course need the line breaks as well).
For better understanding, please see attached picture here:
I am fairly sure that all instances are similarly syntaxed. If not, I may be able to tailor your regex code to differing instances later on.
As you can see, I was trying to do it in two steps but that's not good, because the second step (which I couldn't even get right) would propably have altered other texts I need intact (there must be sentences that start with double brackets after CRLF).
I would need the two steps in one so that only the targeted double bracketed text would be changed to bold or Heading 2.
Basically what I could not do is: find the proper regex solution for matching double CRLF-ed and square-bracketed text for any number of words than may occupy more than one line and starts with a capital letter. I would need an empty line above and below the title as indicated in the image (the VBA macro somehow made two instances of CRLF and carried the brackets to a new line, which I do not like, either).
EDIT.
In the meantime I managed to cook something up but now I couldn't insert the CRLF in front of the match string. At this point this is not enough as other instances are also changed, even lowercase in-line items, for some reason...
Regex:
\[\[([A-Z][\S\s]+?)\]\]
Substitution:
## $1\r\n
https://regex101.com/r/mH6B9N/1
Since then, I made improvements towards what I wanted (I had to test in NotePad++ and not Regex101, for different results), but now in multiple documents I have found match across spill-over lines, as described in here:
Single line regex search in Notepad++
Is it possible that I cannot do what I want? The problem is having non-title text strings having line-break, double brackets and capitalized letters.
What it looks like in other documents:
See here.
I circled around with red in image for clarification. See also:
https://regex101.com/r/8XsIGx/1
Is it possible to match a certain word like "címnél" and not execute on that match if that word is present in a line?
Thanks very much in advance,
F.
You can use
(?s)\R\K\[\[((?:(?!\[\[|]]).)*)\R*]](?=\R)
Replace with ## $1. See the regex demo.
Details:
(?s) - equivalent of the . matches newline option
\R - a line break sequence
\K - omit the text matched so far (the newlines)
\[\[ - a [[ text
((?:(?!\[\[|]]).)*) - Group 1: any char, as many as possible occurrences, that does not start a [[ or ]] char sequence
\R* - zero or more line breaks
]] - a ]] text
(?=\R) - immediately to the right, there must be a line break.
I need some help with building up my regex.
What I am trying to do is match a specific part of text with unpredictable parts in between the fixed words. An example is the sentence one gets when replying to an email:
On date at time person name has written:
The cursive parts are variable, might contains spaces or a new line might start from this point.
To get this, I built up my regex as such: On[\s\S]+?at[\s\S]+?person[\s\S]+?has written:
Basically, the [\s\S]+? is supposed to fill in any letter, number, space or break/new line as I am unable to predict what could be between the fixed words tha I am sure will always be there.
Now comes the hard part, when I would add the word "On" somewhere in the text above the sentence that I want to match, the regex now matches a much bigger text than I want. This is due to the use of [\s\S]+.
How am I able to make my regex match as less characters as possible? Using "?" before the "+" to make it lazy does not help.
Example is here with words "From - This - Point - Everything:". Cases are ignored.
Correct: https://regexr.com/3jdek.
Wrong because of added "From": https://regexr.com/3jdfc
The regex is to be used in VB.NET
A more real life, with html tags, can be found here. Here, I avoided using [\s\S]+? or (.+)?(\r)?(\n)?(.+?)
Correct: https://regexr.com/3jdd1
Wrong: https://regexr.com/3jdfu after adding certain parts of the regex in the text above. Although, in html, barely possible to occur as the user would never write the matching tag himself, I do want to make sure my regex is correctjust in case
These things are certain: I know with what the part of text starts, no matter where in respect to the entire text, I know with what the part of text ends, and there are specific fixed words that might make the regex more reliable, but they can be ommitted. Any text below the searched part is also allowed to be matched, but no text above may be matched at all
Another example where it goes wrong: https://regexr.com/3jdli. Basically, I have less to go with in this text, so the regex has less tokens to work with. Adding just the first < already makes the regex take too much.
From my own experience, most problems are avoided when making sure I do not use any [\s\S]+? before I did a (\r)?(\n)? first
[\s\S] matches all character because of union of two complementary sets, it is like . with special option /s (dot matches newlines). and regex are greedy by default so the largest match will be returned.
Following correct link, the token just after the shortest match must be geschreven, so another way to write without using lazy expansion, which is more flexible is to prepend the repeated chracter set by a negative lookahead inside loop,
so
<blockquote type="cite" [^>]+?>[^O]+?Op[^h]+?heeft(.+?(?=geschreven))geschreven:
becomes
<blockquote type="cite" [^>]+?>[^O]+?Op[^h]+?heeft((?:(?!geschreven).)+)geschreven:
(?: ) is for non capturing the group which just encapsulates the negative lookahead and the . (which can be replaced by [\s\S])
(?! ) inside is the negative lookahead which ensures current position before next character is not the beginning of end token.
Following comments it can be explicitly mentioned what should not appear in repeating sequence :
From(?:(?!this)[\s\S])+this(?:(?!point)[\s\S])+point(?:(?!everything)[\s\S])+everything:
or
From(?:(?!From|this)[\s\S])+this(?:(?!point)[\s\S])+point(?:(?!everything)[\s\S])+everything:
or
From(?:(?!From|this)[\s\S])+this(?:(?!this|point)[\s\S])+point(?:(?!everything)[\s\S])+everything:
to understand what the technic (?:(?!tokens)[\s\S])+ does.
in the first this can't appear between From and this
in the second From or this can't appear between From and this
in the third this or point can't appear between this and point
etc.
The direct question: How can I use REGEX lookarounds to find instances of \r\n that occur between a set of characters (stand in open and closing tags), "[ and ]" with arbitrary characters and line breaks inside as well?
The situation:
I have a large database exported to tab or comma delineated text files that I'm trying to import into excel. The problem is that some of the cells come from text areas that contain line breaks, and are qualified by double quotes. Importing into excel these line breaks are treated as new rows. I cannot adjust how the file is exported. I data needs to be preserved, but the exact format doesn't, so I was planning on using some placeholder for the returns or ~
Here's a generic illustration of the format of my data:
column1rowA column2rowA column3rowA column4rowA
column1rowB column2rowB "column3rowB
3Bcont
3Bcont
3Bcont
" column4rowB
column1rowC column2rowC column4rowC
column1rowD column2rowD "column3rowD
3Dcont" column4rowD
My thought has been to try to select and replace line breaks within the quotes using REGEX search and replace in Notepad++. To try and make is simpler I have tried adding a character to the double quotes to help indicate whether it is an opening or closing quote:
"[column3rowB
3Bcont
3Bcont
3Bcont
]"
I am new to REGEX. The progress I've made (which isn't much) is:
(?<="[) missing some sort of wildcard \r\n(?=.*]")
Every iteration I've tried has also included every line break between the first "[ and last ]"
I would also appreciate any other approaches that solve the underlying problem
If you can use some tool other than Notepad++, you can use this regex (see my working example on regex101):
(?!\n(([^"]*"){2})*[^"]*$)\n
It uses a negative lookahead to find line breaks only when not followed by an even number of quotes. You could replace them with <br>, spaces, or whatever is appropriate.
Breakdown:
(?! ... ) This is the negative lookahead, necessary because it's zero-width. Anything matched by it will still be available to match again.
(([^"]*"){2})* This is the other key piece. It ensures even-numbered pairs of non-quote characters followed by a quote.
[^"]*$ This is ensuring that there are no more quotes from there until the end of the string.
Caveat:
I couldn't get it to work in Notepad++ because it always recognizes $ as the end of a line, not the end of the entire string.
Great answer from Brian. I added an option that would only consider real linebreaks (i.e. \n\r), which worked for my CSV file:
(?!\n|\r(([^"]*"){2})*[^"]*$)\n|\r
I found this regex somewhere online that finds strings in my files that are likely presented to the user for a localization clean-up. However, I have a new task to find specific instances of two words and I thought I could use the same regex. I have tried several combinations but I'm just not good enough at regex to get it right.
Current regex for finding strings:
(?<=text=|label=|prompt=|toolTip=|title=|icon=|String=|Error=|Separator=|Symbol=)(("(?:\.|(\\\")|[^\""\n])*")|('(?:\.|(\\\')|[^\''\n])*'))
But now I want it to also capture if the words: catalog or in stock exist anywhere between the quotes.
Any help would be appreciated.
OK, this should do it, I believe:
(?<=text=|label=|prompt=|toolTip=|title=|icon=|String=|Error=|Separator=|Symbol=)((?:"(?:\.|(\\\")|[^\""\n])*\b(?:catalog|in stock)\b(?:\.|(\\\")|[^\""\n])*")|(?:'(?:\.|(\\\')|[^\''\n])*\b(?:catalog|in stock)\b(?:\.|(\\\')|[^\''\n])*'))
All I did was add \b(?:catalog|in stock)\b in the quote section. For example, for the double-quote section, it used to be this:
"(?:\.|(\\\")|[^\""\n])*"
I.e. any number of non-quote (unless escaped), non-return characters between double-quotes.
Now it is this:
"(?:\.|(\\\")|[^\""\n])*\b(?:catalog|in stock)\b(?:\.|(\\\")|[^\""\n])*"
Which is a double-quote, any number of legal characters as above, "catalog" or "in stock", any number of more legal characters, and a quote.