I'm using TextWrangler, the free version of BBEdit on the Mac, which I understand uses the PCRE engine.
What I want to do is match a specific number of lines and replace as well.
After a lot of searching I came up with this:
(^(.*\r)){25}
This lets me match up to 25 lines. It works great, but the problem comes when I want to actually replace something. I can't figure out how to do it.
For example, I would like to replace all of the returns "\r" with tabs "\t".
Hopefully this is actually possible. I'd appreciate any help. Thanks!
Regexp domain is searching. You cannot replace using regexp; a programming language or editor can use regexp as the search part of its search-and-replace function. Thus, the way to do 25 replacements is purely in the domain of said programming language or editor. If it does not provide such capability, either directly in search-and-replace or as a macro/loop/other, then you cannot do it automatically.
Related
So I read a lot about Negation in Regex but can't solve my problem in MS Word 2016.
How do I exclude a String, Word, Number(s) from being found?
Example:
<[A-Z]{2}[A-Z0-9]{9;11}> to search a String like XY123BBT22223
But how to exclude for example a specefic one like SEDWS12WW04?
Well it depends on what you need to achieve or is this a matter of curiosity... RegEx is not the same as the built-in Advanced Find with Wildcards; for that you need VBA.
Depending on your need, without using VBA, you could make use of space and return characters - something like this will work for the strings provided: [ ^13][A-Z]{2}[0-9]{1,}[A-Z]{1,}[0-9]{1,}[ ^13] (assuming you use normal carriage returns and spaces in your document)
Anyway, this is a good article on wildcard searches in MS Word: https://wordmvp.com/FAQs/General/UsingWildcards.htm
EDIT:
In light of your further comments you will probably want to look at section 8 of the linked article which explains grouping. For my proposed search you can use this to your advantage by creating 3 groups in your 'find' and only modifying the middle group, if indeed you do intend to modify. Using groups the search would look something like:
([ ^13])([A-Z]{2}[0-9]{1,}[A-Z]{1,}[0-9]{1,})([ ^13])
and the replace might look like this:
\1 SOMETHING \3
Note also: compared to a RegEx solution my suggestion is kinda lame, mainly because compared to RegEx, MS-Words find and replace (good as it is, and really it is) is kinda lame... it's hacky but it might work for you (although you might need to do a few searches).
BUT... if it really is REGEX that you want, well you can get access to this via VBA: How to Use/Enable (RegExp object) Regular Expression using VBA (MACRO) in word
And... then you will be able to use proper RegEx for find and replace, well almost - I'm under the impression that the VBA RegEx still has some quirks...
As already noted by others, this is not possible in Microsoft Word's flavor of regular expressions.
Instead, you should use standard regular expressions. It is actually possible to use standard regular expressions in MS Word if you use a special tool that integrates into Microsoft Word called Multiple Find & Replace (see http://www.translatortools.net/products/transtoolsplus/word-multiplefindreplace). This tool opens as a pane to the right of the document window and works just like the Advanced Find & Replace dialog. However, in addition to Word's existing search functionality, it can use the standard regular expressions syntax to search and replace any text within a Word document.
In your particular case, I would use this:
\b[A-Z]{2}[A-Z0-9]{9,11}\b(?<!\bSEDWS12WW04)
To explain, this searches for a word boundary + ID + word boundary, and then it looks back to make sure that the preceding string does not match [word boundary + excluded ID]. In a similar vein, you can do something like
(?<!\bSEDWS12WW04|\bSEDWS12WW05|\bSEDWS12WW05)
to exlude several IDs.
Multiple Find & Replace is quite powerful: you can add any number of expressions (either using regular expressions or using Word's standard search syntax) to a list and then search the document for all of them, replace everything, display all matches in a list and replace only specific matches, and a few more things.
I created this tool for translators and editors, but it is great for any advanced search/replace operations in Word, and I am sure you will find it very useful.
Best regards, Stanislav
According to the received wisdom MS Word (more or less) supports find/replace with use of regular expressions. I have a simple regular expression:
^(C[[:alpha:]]*)(\d*)(.*)$
That I'm running on the data:
indSIMDdecile
CSdeccrim12006
CSdeccrim12006
CSdeccrim12009
CSdeccrim12009
CSdeccrim12012
CSdeccrim12012
CSdeceduc12004
CSdeceduc12004
CSdeceduc12006
CSdeceduc12006
CSdeceduc12009
CSdeceduc12009
CSdeceduc12012
CSdeceduc12012
CSdecemp12004.x
I'm interested in returning the first word prior to the digit 1, which works as demonstrated on regex101 here.
Problem
I would like to the same but in MS Word (v. 15.18 on Mac). After getting error messages of trying to supply unsuitable syntax I learned that MS Word does not support to the full regex syntax. I simplified my expression to something on the lines:
but the search does not find any strings and nothing gets replaced. Hence my questions, is it possible to use MS Word on Mac with regex?
The linked help website hints that something like that should be possible, but so far now luck.
The simple answer is "no", if you mean "Does Mac Word have a UI feature that lets you use one of the modern dialects of regex?" Word's Find/Replace only supports its own Regular Expression syntax.
In this case, I think the following will give you what you need:
Find with wildcards:
(C)([!1]#)(1)
and a replace by
\1
(If you also had to find "C1", then that doesn't work, and unfortunately nor does
(C)([!1]{0,})(1)
because Word does not allow 0 in the {,} pattern)
But there is a problem with "#". If the text the "#" is looking for is long, the find/replace may fail. There is supposed to be a 255 limit, but it seems rather more arbitrary than that. (I have long suspected a buffer overrun type error in the Word code, but perhaps there is a simpler explanation).
If you mean, "is there any way to use modern regex with Word?", then the answer is "Yes, but you only get to operate on a copy of the text in the document. You will need to create your own code to do the 'replace' part of the find replace, and that means that you would have to deal with any of the issues such as preserving formatting that Word's built-in find/replace might get right for you.
On the Windows side, people who want a better regex than Word's often use VBScript's regexp object because it is easily used from VBA. VBA itself only really has the "like" operator, which also only has fairly crude pattern matching abilities. I think there are examples of VBScript rexexp use on StackOverflow. On the Mac side, you would either have to use VBA and "shell out" to one of the built-in Mac/Unix utilities to do your finding (and perhaps replacing), or perhaps use Applescript or Javascript application scripting to do it. As far as I can remember Applescript does not have a 'modern' regex built-in either.
[As a bit of history, Word's "regular expressions" were I think introduced in Word 6, around 1993, at a time when most dialects of regex were much more crude than they are today. I don't think Word's version has moved along much at all - it probably added some Unicode support at some point, but that's probably about it. I assume that people using modern regex don't regard it as regex at all, and I personally prefer not to call Word's Regular Expressions 'regex' precisely for that reason.]
I have 2000 page website and it contains over 500 acronyms. What Regular expression could I use to find all the acronyms in the text only? I'm using dream-weaver. Some examples would be AFD, GTDC, IJQW and so on.. these are 2 or more capitals might be bounded or surround by other characters. Such example would be (DFT) or l'WQF - any ideas??
If dreamweaver has search via grep capability, you could just search for any string of letters with all capitals, including whatever necessary punctuation you need, e.g. [A-Z'-]{3,}. The 3 is the minumum number of letters in the acronym... you can change that as needed.
This would probably be better done via shell script, though, just for speed's sake. Let us know what OS you're using and someone else can leave a comment as to how to script that, as I probably don't know.
I'm kind of new to programming, so forgive me if this is terribly obvious (which would be welcome news).
I do a fair amount of PHP development in my free time using pregmatch and writing most of my expressions using the free (open source?) Regex Tester.
However frequently I find myself wanting to simply quickly extract something and the only way I know to do it is to write my expression and then script it, which is probably laughable, but welcome to my reality. :-)
What I'd like is something like a simple text editor that I can feed my expression to (given a file or a buffer full of pasted text) and have it parse the expression and return a document with only the results.
What I find is usually regex search/replace functions, as in Notepad++ I can easily find (and replace) all instances using an expression, but I simply don't know how to only extract it...
And it's probably terribly obvious, can expression match only the inverse? Then I could use something like (just the expression I'm currently working on):
([^<]*)
And replace everything that doesn't match with nothing. But I'm sure this is something common and simple, I'd really appreciate any poniters.
FWIW I know grep and I could do it using that, but I'm hoping their are better gui'ified solution I'm simply ignorant of.
Thanks.
Zach
What I was hoping for would be something that worked in a more standard set of gui tools (ie, the tools I might already be using). I appreciate all the responses, but using perl or vi or grep is what I was hoping to avoid, otherwise I would have just scripted it myself (of course I did) since their all relatively powerful, low-level tools.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough. As a senior systems administrator the cli tools are familiar to me, I'm quite fond of them. Working at home however I find most of my time is spent in a gui, like Netbeans or Notepad++. I just figure there would be a simple way to achieve the regex based data extraction using those tools (since in these cases I'd already be using them).
Something vaguely like what I was referring to would be this which will take aa expression on the first line and a url on the second line and then extract (return) the data.
It's ugly (I'll take it down after tonight since it's probably riddled with problems).
Anyway, thanks for your responses. I appreciate it.
If you want a text editor with good regex support, I highly recommend Vim. Vim's regex engine is quite powerful and is well-integrated into the editor. e.g.
:g!/regex/d
This says to delete every line in your buffer which doesn't match pattern regex.
:g/regex/s/another_regex/replacement/g
This says on every line that matches regex, do another search/replace to replace text matching another_regex with replacement.
If you want to use commandline grep or a Perl/Ruby/Python/PHP one-liner any other tool, you can filter the current buffer's text through that tool and update the buffer to reflect the results:
:%!grep regex
:%!perl -nle 'print if /regex/'
Have you tried nregex.com ?
http://www.nregex.com/nregex/default.aspx
There's a plugin for Netbeans here, but development looks stalled:
http://wiki.netbeans.org/Regex
http://wiki.netbeans.org/RegularExpressionsModuleProposal
You might also try The Regulator:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/regulator/
Most regex engines will allow you to match the opposite of the regex.
Usually with the ! operator.
I know grep has been mentioned, and you don't want a cli tool, but I think ack deserves to be mentioned.
ack is a tool like grep, aimed at
programmers with large trees of
heterogeneous source code.
ack is written purely in Perl, and
takes advantage of the power of Perl's
regular expressions.
A good text editor can be used to perform the actions you are describing. I use EditPadPro for search and replace functionality and it has some other nice feaures including code coloring for most major formats. The search panel functionality includes a regular expression mode that allows you to input a regex then search for the first instance which identifies if your expression matches the appropriate information then gives you the option to replace either iteratively or all instances.
http://www.editpadpro.com
My suggestion is grep, and cygwin if you're stuck on a Windows box.
echo "text" | grep ([^<]*)
OR
cat filename | grep ([^<]*)
What I'd like is something like a
simple text editor that I can feed my
expression to (given a file or a
buffer full of pasted text) and have
it parse the expression and return a
document with only the results.
You have just described grep. This is exactly what grep does. What's wrong with it?
Using a regex, I am able to find a bunch of numbers that I want to replace. However, I want to replace the number with another number that is calculated using the original - captured - number.
Is that possible in notepad++ using a kind of expression in the replacement-part?
Edit: Maybe a strange thought, but could the calculation be done in the search part, generating a second captured number that would effectively be the result?
Even if it is possible, it will almost certainly be "messy" - why not do the replacements with a simple script instead? For example..
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
f = File.new("f1.txt", File::RDWR)
contents = f.read()
contents.gsub!(/\d+/){|m|
m.to_i + 1 # convert the current match to an integer, and add one
}
f.truncate(0) # empty the existing file
f.seek(0) # seek to the start of the file, before writing again
f.write(contents) # write modified file
f.close()
..and the output:
$ cat f1.txt
This was one: 1
This two two: 2
$ ruby replacer.rb
$ cat f1.txt
This was one: 2
This two two: 3
In reply to jeroen's comment,
I was actually interested if the possibility existed in the regular expression itself as they are so widespread
A regular expression is really just a simple pattern matching syntax. To do anything more advanced than search/replace with the matches would be up to the text-editors, but the usefulness of this is very limited, and can be achieved via scripting most editors allow (Notepad++ has a plugin system, although I've no idea how easy it is to use).
Basically, if regex/search-and-replace will not achieve what you want, I would say either use your editors scripting ability or use an external script.
Is that possible in notepad++ using a kind of expression in the replacement-part?
Interpolated evaluation of regular-expression matches is a relatively advanced feature that I probably would not expect to find in a general-purpose text editing application. I played around with Notepad++ a bit but was unable to get this to work, nor could I find anything in the documentation that suggests this is possible.
Hmmm... I'd have to recommend AWK to do this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWK
notepad++ has limited regular expressions built in. There are extensions that add a bit more to the regular expression find and replace, but I've found those hard to use. I would recommend writing a little external program to do it for you. Either Ruby, Perl or Python would be great for it. If you know those languages. I use Ruby and have had lots of success with it.