Regular Expression to deal with text issue - regex

Question

I have the following text sample:
Sample Supplier 123
AP Invoices 123456 -229.00
AP Invoices 235435 337.00
AP Invoices 444323 228.00
AP Invoices 576432 248.00
It's from a text file with 21,000 lines, which lists invoices against a supplier.
The pattern is always the same on each block of invoices against each supplier, where:
The supplier name starts at the beginning of a line
The invoices being to be listed 2 rows down from the supplier name, indented by one space.
I wondered if I can use a Regular Expression (I'm using TextPad as a Text Editor on a Windows PC) to:
Append each invoice line with a tab (\t)
Append the supplier name in front of the tab so each invoice line now starts with the supplier name, and a tab, where the supplier name is taken from 2 rows above the start of each block of invoices
Delete the supplier name line from above the invoice block.
Expected output:
Sample Supplier 123 AP Invoices 123456 -229.00
Sample Supplier 123 AP Invoices 235435 337.00
Sample Supplier 123 AP Invoices 444323 228.00
Sample Supplier 123 AP Invoices 576432 248.00
I realise I am probably asking for "the moon on a stick" here, but the alternative is to go through a 21,000 line text file and copy and paste the data into Excel, which might not be a very good use of my time.
Maybe I can't do it using a simple regular expression, or maybe it's simply not possible at all.
Any advice would be much appreciated.
Thanks

Answer 1

I would use a simple Python script to solve this issue:
currentheader = ""
with open("yourfile.txt") as f:
with open("newfile.txt","w") as fw:
for line in f:
if len(line.strip()) == 0:
continue
elif line[0] != " ": #new header
currentheader = line[:-1]
else:
fw.write(currentheader + "\t" + line[1:])
For this to work, on Windows you will have to install Python. Python 2 or 3 should both work with this script. After installing Python, you open a command line (Win+R, cmd, Enter), navigate to the folder your file is in using cd foldername, if necessary, and then type python dealWithTextIssue.py (after having saved the script as "dealWithTextIssue.py" there.

Answer 2

I think this isn't solvable just with regex, you'll have to do some programming. I made a little script in PHP:
$string = <<<EOL
Sample Supplier 123
AP Invoices 123456 -229.00
AP Invoices 235435 337.00
AP Invoices 444323 228.00
AP Invoices 576432 248.00
Second Supplier
A B C D
B F
EOL;
$array = preg_split("~[\n\r]+~", $string);
foreach ($array as $value) {
if (strpos($value, " ") == 0) {
if (strlen(trim($value)) > 0) {
echo "\t".$header.rtrim($value).PHP_EOL;
}
}
else {
$header = $value;
}
}
You can see it at work for example here after clicking on execute code.