Doing a find and replace in VsCode on a large amount of files. I'm looking to replace all spaces after a set of quotes, but only on a specific line.
I can very easily find all spaces using \s+, but I don't understand how to capture only the spaces after a specific string(one specific line). I've tried positive look behinds, but I can only get it to match the first space, but I need to match all spaces on that line.
Example code:
variable = "01 - Testing this thing"
I need to find and replace all the spaces between the quotation marks with underscores, but I can't get any regex to match all the spaces between the quotes. I might want to replace the dash(-) as well, but the spaces are more important and I'm struggling to figure it out.
Here is a pretty good workflow.
Open a Search Editor (from the Command Palette or set a keybinding to it).
Use this regex (?<=variable = ")[^"]*.
That will find all matches in all files in your workspace or whatever folders you designate in the file to include filter. I suggest setting the context lines option to 0.
Ctrl+Shift+L to select all your matches. The matches are the 01 - Testing this thing part.
Now do a regular find in that search editor tab - with the Find in Selection option enabled.
Simply doing a find of and replaceAll with _ will make all those changes (in the Search Editor only).
To apply those changes to all the files with your initial search results, use the extension search-editor-apply-changes Apply Search Editor Changes... command.
Then you can check to see if the changes were as you expected and save all. It will open all affected files so you can inspect them.
Seems like a few steps but notice the first regex can be very simple. And then you are doing a simple find/replace in just those selections. Demo:
You search for a string that matches, it has A space between the quotes. Replace with what is before and after the space but the space is now an underscore. You have to apply this as often as the max number od spaces in a string. It can't be done in 1 regex search-replace.
In the Search Bar
Find Regex:
(variable = "[^" ]*) ([^"]*")
Replace:
$1_$2
Then apply Replace All (button) and Refresh (button) until no more searches found.
In a long corpus of text, I want to make some corrections in certain
environments. However, I am encountering problems when using regex with text
editors. I switched to gedit to have an editor which supports regex in
search & replace.
Crucially, I only want to make changes if the line starts with a certain
pattern (\nm or \mb). The problem is that the element that I want to
replace (o' -> o'o) is not at a fixed length from the beginning of the line
and I can't include the regex in the lookbehind (the lookbehind fails).
Is there any way to include what I am looking for in a simple text editor
regex? Or is this already a step where I have to learn how to script in, for
example, Python?
This is what the regex looks like so far.
(?<=\\(nm|mb)).*o'(?=(q|w|r|t|z|p|s|d|f|g|h|j|k|l|x|c|v|b|n|m|a|i|u|e))
Of course, I can't apply .* in the replace without losing its content.
Put a capture group around .* and a back-reference in the replacement.
Find: (?<=\\(nm|mb))(.*)o'(?=(q|w|r|t|z|p|s|d|f|g|h|j|k|l|x|c|v|b|n|m|a|i|u|e))
Replace: \1o'o
I'm trying to do a find/replace in Eclipse using the following pattern: \$.*}.
If I put this into the "find" search box in Eclipse I can find all the matches in a file (e.g. ${MASTER_KEY}). However, I'm not sure what to put in the "replace" box. My goal is to replace ${MASTER_KEY} with $'{MASTER_KEY}'. I tried '\$.*}', but that didn't work.
Search By this:
\$\{(.*?)\}
and replace by this:
\$'\{\1\}'
Explanation:
{.*} will match "${abc}pqr${def}" as a single match which will be wrong in your case. Whereas .*? makes it lazy thus it will match ${abc} and ${def} separately which you need.
Eclipse regexp search works pretty well, so for example in search box I have this:
(?s)(myMethod.*?;)\}\);
Now I want to copy multiline text in the IDE and in replace box, for example I want to paste \1PASTE_MULTILINE_TEXT_HERE. However Eclipse does not allow me to directly copy-paste multiline text without manually inserting newline characters.
In Vim (Gvim, Macvim) it works perfectly well, keeping all the spaces; how can I do the same thing in Eclipse?
For searching multiple lines in Eclipse, you must use the 's' parameter in search expression:
(?s)someExpressionToMatchInAnyLine
For replacing with multiple lines exp you must use \R i.e:
line1\Rline2\Rline3
This will replace the matched exp with:
line1
line2
line3
Generally, the approach I've taken to doing this sort of thing is to type out what I want to use as a replacement, select that, open up the Find/Replace dialog, and copy the contents of the Find text box. I proceed from there and paste what I copied into the Replace text box. There is still a little work to be done (removing backslashes from in front of regex special characters that don't apply in the Replace box), but it gives me a hand up.
I've hit a wall. Does anybody know a good text editor that has search and replace like Notepad++ but can also do multi-line regex search and replace? Basically, I am trying to find something that can match a regex like:
search oldlog\(.*\n\s+([\r\n.]*)\);replace newlog\(\1\)
Any ideas?
Notepad++ can now handle multi line regular expressions (just update to the latest version - feature was introduced around March '12).
I needed to remove all onmouseout and onmouseover statements from an HTML document and I needed to create a non-greedy multi line match.
onmouseover=.?\s*".*?"
Make sure you check the: [ ] . matches newline checkbox if you want to use the multi line match capability.
EditPad Pro has better regex capabilities than any other editor I've ever used.
Also, I suspect you have an error in your regex — [\r\n.] will match only carriage returns, newlines, and full stops. If you're trying to match any character (i.e. "dot operator plus CR and LF), try [\s\S] instead.
My personal recommendation is IDM Computing's UltraEdit (www.ultraedit.com) - it can do regular expressions (both search and replace) with Perl, Unix and UltraEdit syntax. Multi-line matching is one of the capabilities in Perl regex mode in it.
It also has other nice search capabilities (e.g search in specific character column range, search in multiple files, search history, search favorites, etc...)
(source: ultraedit.com)
The Zeus editor can do multi-line search and replace.
I use Eclipse, which is free and that you may already have if you are a developer. '\R' acts as platform independent line delimiter. Here is an example of multi-line search:
search:
\bibitem.(\R.)?\R?{([^{])}$\R^([^\].[^}]$\R.$\R.)
and replace:
\defcitealias{$2}{$3}
I'm pretty sure Notepad++ can do that now via the TextFX plugin (which is included by default). Hit Control-R in Notepad++ and have a play.
TextPad has good Regex search and replace capabilities; I've used it for a while and am pretty happy with it.
From the Features:
Powerful search/replace engine using
UNIX-style regular expressions, with
the power of editor macros. Sets of
files in a directory tree can be
searched, and text can be replaced in
all open documents at once.
For more options than you could possibly need, check out "Notepad++ Alternatives" at AlternativeTo.net.
you can use Python Script plugin for Multiline Regular Expression search and replace!
- http://npppythonscript.sourceforge.net/docs/latest/scintilla.html?highlight=pymlreplace#Editor.pymlreplace
# This example replaces any <br/> that is followed by another on the next line (with optional spaces in between), with a single one
editor.pymlreplace(r"<br/>\s*\r\n\s*<br/>", "<br/>\r\n")
I use Notepad++ all the time but it's Regex has alway been a bit lacking.
Sublime Text is what you want.
EditPlus does a good job at search/replace using regex (including multiline)
You could use Visual Studio. Download Express for free if you don't have a copy.
VS's regex is non-standard, so you'd have to use \n:b+[\r\n] instead.
The latest version of UltraEdit has multiline find and replace w/ regex support.
Or if you're OK with using a more specialized regular expression tool for this, there's Regex Hero. It has the side benefit of being able to do everything on the fly. In other words, you don't have to click a button to test your regular expression because it's automatically tested after every keypress.
Personally, I'd use UltraEdit if I'm looking to replace text in multiple files. That way I can just select the files to replace as a batch and click Replace. But if I'm working with a single text file and I'm in need of writing a more complex regular expression then I'd paste it into Regex Hero and work with it there. That's because Regex Hero can save time when you see everything happen in real-time.
ED for windows has two versions of regex, three sorts of cut and paste (selection, lines or blocks, AND you can shift from one to the next (unlike ultra edit, which is clunky at best) with just a mouse click while you are highlighting -- no need to pull down a menu. The sheer speed of getting the job done is incredible, like reading on a Kindle, you don't have to think about it.
You can use a recent version of Notepad++ (Mine is 6.2.2).
No need to use the option ". match newline" as suggested in another answer. Instead, use the adequate regular expression with ^ for "begin of line" and $ for "end of line". Then use \r\n after the $ for a "new line" in a dos file (or just \n in a unix file as the carriage return is mainly used for dos/windows text file):
Ex.: to remove all lines starting with tags OBJE after a line starting with a tag UID (from a gedcom file - used in genealogy), I did use the following search regex:
^UID (.*)$\r\n^(OBJE (.*)$\r\n)+
And the following replace value:
UID \1\r\n
This is matching lines like this:
UID 4FBB852FB485B2A64DE276675D57A1BA
OBJE #M4#
OBJE #M3#
OBJE #M2#
OBJE #M1#
and the output of the replacement is
UID 4FBB852FB485B2A64DE276675D57A1BA
550 instances have been replaced in less than 1 sec. Notepad++ is really efficient!
Otherwise, to validate a Regular expression I like to use the .Net RegEx Tester (http://regexhero.net/tester/). It's really great to write and test on the fly a Reg Ex...
PS.: Also, you can use [\s\S] in your regex to match any character including new lines. So, if you look for any block of "multi-line" text starting with "xxx" and ending with "abc", the following Regex will be fine:^xxx[\s\S]*?abc$ where "*?" is to match as less as possible between xxx and abc !!!