Can Notepad++ save out search results to a text file? - regex

Question

I need to do quite a few regular expression search/replaces throughout hundreds and hundreds of static files. I'm looking to build an audit trail so I at least know what files were touched by what searches/replaces.
I can do my regular expression searches in Notepad++ and it gives me file names/paths and number of hits in each file. It also gives me the line #s which I don't really care that much about.
What I really want is a separate text file of the file names/paths. The # of hits in each file would be a nice addition, but really it's just a list of file names/paths that I'm after.
In Notepad++'s search results pane, I can do a right click and copy, but that includes all the line #s and code which is just too much noise, especially when you're getting hundreds of matches.
Anyone know how I can get these results to just the file name/paths? I'm after something like:
/about/foo.html
/about/bar.html
/faq/2012/awesome.html
/faq/2013/awesomer.html
/foo/bar/baz/wee.html
etc.
Then I can name that file regex_whatever_search.txt and at the top of it include the regex used for the search and replace. Below that, I've got my list of files it touched.
UPDATE What looks like the easiest thing to do (at least that I've found) is to just copy all the search results into a new text file and run the following regex:
^\tLine.+$
And replace that with an empty string. That'll give you just the file path and hit counts with a lot of empty space between each entry. Then run the following regex:
\s+\n
And replace with:
\n
That'll strip out all the unwanted empty space and you'll be left with a nice list.

Answer 1

maybe you need power of unix tools
assume you have GNUWin32 installed in c:\tools\gnuwin32
than if you have replace.bat file with that content:
#echo off
set BIN=c:\tools\gnuwin32\bin
set WHAT=%1
set TOWHAT=%2
set MASK=%3
rem Removing quotes
SET WHAT=###%WHAT%###
SET WHAT=%WHAT:"###=%
SET WHAT=%WHAT:###"=%
SET WHAT=%WHAT:###=%
SET TOWHAT=###%TOWHAT%###
SET TOWHAT=%TOWHAT:"###=%
SET TOWHAT=%TOWHAT:###"=%
SET TOWHAT=%TOWHAT:###=%
SET MASK=###%MASK%###
SET MASK=%MASK:"###=%
SET MASK=%MASK:###"=%
SET MASK=%MASK:###=%
echo %WHAT% replaces to %TOWHAT%
rem printing matching files
%BIN%\grep -r -c "%WHAT%" %MASK%
rem actual replace
%BIN%\find %MASK% -type f -exec %BIN%\sed -i "s/%WHAT%/%TOWHAT%/g" {} +
you can do regex replace in masked files recursively with output you required
replace "using System.Windows" "using Nothing" *.cs

Answer 2

The regulat expression I use for this kind of problem is
^\tLine.[0-9]*:.
And it works for me

Answer 3

This works well if you have Excel available and want to avoid using regular expressions:
Ctrl+A to select all the results
drag & drop the selected results to Excel
Create a Filter on the 1st row
Filter out the lines that have "(Blank)" on the 1st column
Select the remaining lines (i.e. the lines with the filenames) and copy/paste them to another sheet or any wanted destination
You could also Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C the search results, then use the Paste Option "Use Text Import Wizard" in Excel, say that the data is "Fixed width" and put one single break line after the 2nd character (to remove the two leading spaces in the filename during import), and use a filter to filter out the unwanted rows.