Real quick question here that i cant work out.
I have a bunch of text files across many directories. Within these dirs are text files named init.txt
In these many text files, are lots of lines starting with
Effective =
What i need to do is replace any line that contains that string with another string,
preferably in Notepad++, or UltraEdit if need be.
In Notepad++, iv found Search -> Replace in Files... which lets me specify a starting directory, but i cant get to replace the entire line with my new line.
I have never used regular expressions before (if thats the best way to do this) as iv never needed to, so any help would be very much appreciated.
Thank you for helping me out.
For your problem, a litter regular expression may help a lot. I use regex search in Notepad++ nearly everyday, and it is really useful.
I do not want to itimidate you with some complicated regex grammar. Instead, I hope after reading my answer, you might see that the basics of regular expression is not so exotic, and it is for regular people's everyday use.
Follow these instructions:
In Notepad++ press Ctrl-F, and switch to the Find in Files tab, in Serach mode part(it is on the bottom of the dialog), select Regular expression
In the Find what field, what you need to input here may vary according to the specific pattern of the text you want to replace.
If the text fragment you want to substitute always
Shows up at the beginning of a line,
There is NO LEADING WHITESPACES before the text,
It containes EXACTLY ONE SPCACE CHARACTER before the = character
^Effective = should be used as the pattern in the Find what Field.
The ^ symbol in ^Effective = means matching begin of the line (so if Effectiv = appears in the middle of a line, it will be ignored ), and the rest is the exact words to be matched.
However, if the above conditions is not all satisfied, e.g.
the text segement may containe leading whitesapces,
the number of withspaces between the word Effective and = symbol may vary, from one to unlimited
Under such circumstance, you may need to use ^Effective\s+=.
The \s+ part in ^Effective\s+= matches one to unlimited number of whitespaces(including, spaces \0x20, tabs \t, carrige-return \r, and new-line \n)
If you want to match zero to unlimited spaces between Effective and =, you can replace \s+ to \s*
In the Rplace with field, input changeLine
In filters filed, select the file type you want to search
Check In all sub-folders
Click Replace in Files button
Set the search mode in Notepad++
Find: Effective =
Replace with: changeLine
Search Mode: Extended (\n, \t, etc)
From: https://superuser.com/questions/34451/notepad-find-and-replace-string-with-a-new-line
Related
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.
I use Notepad++,
i need to search and replace entire word that contain a specific keyword.
Ex: someting HELP.blablabla.blabla someting
i would like to search entire text for words that contain the keyword "HELP" untill the first space OR the first comma.
In this case: HELP.blablabla.blabla
thanks a lot
Go to the search panel, check the regex checkbox on the bottom and try: (HELP)([^ ,]*)
Note: There are a space character after the ^
This regex means: Search for the entire word HELP (HELP) followed by anything that it isn't an space or an comma [^ ,] the ^ inside the brackets is a denial
Edit:
You can use just HELP[^ ,]* the parenthesis is just to create capturing groups if you need to use the specific groups to replace later. As pointed by #alphabravo
You say search and replace an entire word but if it were that simple then I wonder why a regular search and replace isn't sufficient. So I'm reading between the lines and assuming you want to match on full lines of text.
I think I've used npp enough to get the syntax right. I don't remember any eccentricities that would apply. Is the comma/space optional?
^[^, ]*HELP[^, ]*[, ]
I'm kinda thinking this one might be good enough:
^[^, ]*HELP
I am editing an e-book document with a lot of unnecessary markup. I have a number of sections in the text with code similar to this:
<i>Some text here</i>
I am trying to run a regex find and replace that will find any phrase between the two i-tags, remove the i-tags, and apply a style to the text.
Here is what I'm using to search:
Find: (<i>)(*)(</i>)
Replace: \2
I'm also selecting Styles > i (for italic). This tells our conversion software to apply italics to the text. If I leave the i-tags, what ends up happening is ScribeNet's conversion process converts them to hex-values so that they show up as literal text in the e-book. Messy.
When I run this search, I get no results. I have "use wildcards" checked. What am I missing? According to Microsoft's help website, * is used to represent any number or type of characters, and individual strings are supposed to be enclosed in parentheses.
To search for a character that's defined as a wildcard, place a backslash (\) before that character. The * itself matches any string of characters, so use the range quantifier to match (1 or more times)
Find: \<i\>(*{1,})\</i\>
Replace: \1
Search for \<i\>(*{1,})\</i\> and replace with \1. Don't forget to check Use wildcard.
There is a reference table for Word's "regular expressions" here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-ca/word-help/find-and-replace-text-by-using-regular-expressions-advanced-HA102350661.aspx
< and > are special characters that need to be escaped
* means any character
{1,} means one or more times
There is a special tool for Microsoft Word called Multiple Find & Replace (see http://www.translatortools.net/products/transtoolsplus/word-multiplefindreplace) which allows to work around Word's wildcard limitations. This tool can use the standard regular expressions syntax to search and replace any text within a Word document. For example, to search for any HTML tags, you can just use <[^>]+> which will find opening, closing and standalone HTML tags. You can add any number of expressions to a list and then search the document for all of them, replace everything, see all matches for all the search expressions entered, replace only selected matches, and a few more things.
I created it 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.
Stanislav
I'm terrible at regex and need to remove everything from a large portion of text except for a certain variable declaration that occurs numerous times, id like to remove everything except for instances of mc_gross=anyint.
Generally we'd need to use "negative lookarounds" to find everything but a specified string. But these are fairly inefficient (although that's probably of little concern to you in this instance), and lookaround is not supported by all regex engines (not sure about notepad++, and even then probably depends on the version you're using).
If you're interested in learning about that approach, refer to How to negate specific word in regex?
But regardless, since you are using notepad++, I'd recommend selecting your target, then inverting the selection.
This will select each instance, allowing for optional white space either side of the '=' sign.
mc_gross\s*=\s*\d+
The following answer over on super user explains how to use bookmarks in notepad++ to achieve the "inverse selection":
https://superuser.com/questions/290247/how-to-delete-all-line-except-lines-containing-a-word-i-need
Substitute the regex they're using over there, with the one above.
You could do a regular expression replace of ^.*\b(mc_gross\s*=\s*\d+)\b.*$ with \1. That will remove everything other than the wanted text on each line. Note that on lines where the wanted text occurs two or more times, only one occurrence will be retained. In the search the ^.*\b matches from start-of-line to a word boundary before the wanted text; the \b.*$ matches everything from a word boundary after the wanted text until end of line; the round brackets capture the wanted text for the replacement text. If text such as abcmc_gross=13def should be matched and retained as mc_gross=13 then delete the \bs from the search.
To remove unwanted lines do a regular expression search for ^mc_gross\s*=\s*\d+$ from the Mark tab, tick Bookmark line and click Mark all. Then use Menu => Search => Bookmark => Remove unmarked lines.
Find what: [\s\S]*?(mc_gross=\d+|\Z)
Replace with: \1
Position the cursor at the start of the text then Replace All.
Add word boundaries \b around mc_gross=\d+ if you think it's necessary.
I have been fighting this problem with the help of a RegEx cheat sheet, trying to figure out how to do this, but I give up... I have this lengthy file open in Notepad++ and would like to remove all lines that do not start with a digit (0..9). I would use the Find/Replace functionality of N++. I am only mentioning this as I am not sure what Regex implementation is N++ using... Thank you
Example. From the following text:
1hello
foo
2world
bar
3!
I would like to extract
1hello
2world
3!
not:
1hello
2world
3!
by doing a find/replace on a regular expression.
You can clear up those line with ^[^0-9].* but it will leave blank lines.
Notepad++ use scintilla, and also using its regex engine to match those.
\r and \n are never matched because in
Scintilla, regular expression searches
are made line per line (stripped of
end-of-line chars).
http://www.scintilla.org/SciTERegEx.html
To clear up those blank lines, only way is choose extended mode, and replace \n\n to \n, If you are in windows mode change \r\n\r\n to \r\n
[^0-9] is a regular expression that matches pretty much anything, except digits. If you say ^[^0-9] you "anchor" it to the start of the line, in most regular expression systems. If you want to include the rest of the line, use ^[^0-9].+.
^[^\d].* marks a whole line whose first character is not a digit. Check if there are really no whitespaces in front of the digits. Otherwise you'd have to use a different expression.
UPDATE:
You will have to do ot in two steps. First empty the lines that do not start with a digit. Then remove the empty lines in extended mode.
One could also use the technique of bookmarking in Notepad++. I started benefiting from this feature (long time present but only more recently made somewhat more visible in the UI) not very long ago.
Simply bring up the find dialogue, type regex for lines not starting with digit ^\D.*$ and select Mark All. This will place blue circles, like marbles, in the left gutter - these are line bookmarks. Then just select from main menu Search -> Bookmark -> Remove bookmarked lines.
Bookmarks are cool, you could extract these lines by simply selecting to copy bookmarked lines, opening new document and pasting lines there. I sometimes use this technique when reviewing log files.
I'm not sure what you are asking. but the reg exp for finding the lines with a digit at the beginning would be
^\d.*
you can remove all the lines that match the above or alternatly keep all the lines that match this expression:
^[^\d].*