In insert mode, Ctrlr/ (see :h "/) will paste the contents of the search register. However, if you search for a word with * and paste the search register, it will put in the special word boundary characters \< and \>. Or, if you're lucky, you might get '\Vsearch. I think this is silly, but I'm sure VIM has its reasons for making my life harder. How would I go about getting the contents of the search register without special vim magic characters?
The search register may contain no (simple /foo search), few (\<cword\> search from * command), or a lot (^\%(foo\|bar\)\w\+!\?) "special characters". For the first two, there's usually a single match, for the last, there can be many matches.
Initially I've used a mapping that filtered away the special regexp atoms, but then I've written a more general PatternComplete plugin (just published), that provides insert-mode and command-line mappings to insert the match(es). It also allows you to enter a regexp and then insert all matches.
Why would you want the search register to contain anything else than exactly the previous search pattern? #/ contains the pattern, not the match.
If you do /\Vfoo*bar it's normal and expected that you get \Vfoo*bar in the / register. Same for /foo\*bar where you'd get foo\*bar… The point of the search register is to be reused for further searches and substitutions: if it contained foo*bar instead of \Vfoo*bar, you couldn't do n or N or :s//baz which would make everyone's life a lot harder.
Since there is no verynomagic option you can set in your ~/.vimrc I guess that you could do a substitution on the content of the register before pasting it.
fee faa foo*bar baz bam
/\Vfoo*bar<CR>
:reg /<CR>
\Vfoo*bar
:let #a = substitute(#\, '\\V', '', '')<CR>
"ap
foo*bar
Maybe you could create a mapping that does the substitution and the pasting in one go.
But I have a hunch that what you really want is to reuse the matched text, not the search pattern. If I'm right, see this tip for a possible solution.
Related
I am currently learning regex and I am trying to filter all links (eg: http://www.link.com/folder/file.html) from a document with notepad++. Actually I want to delete everything else so that in the end only the http links are listed.
So far I tried this : http\:\/\/www\.[a-zA-Z0-9\.\/\-]+
This gives me all links which is find, but how do I delete the remaining stuff so that in the end I have a neat list of all links?
If I try to replace it with nothing followed by \1, obviously the link will be deleted, but I want the exact opposite to have everything else deleted.
So it should be something like:
- find a string of numbers, letters and special signs until "http"
- delete what you found
- and keep searching for more numbers, letters ans special signs after "html"
- and delete that again
Any ideas? Thanks so much.
In Notepad++, in the Replace menu (CTRL+H) you can do the following:
Find: .*?(http\:\/\/www\.[a-zA-Z0-9\.\/\-]+)
Replace: $1\n
Options: check the Regular expression and the . matches newline
This will return you with a list of all your links. There are two issues though:
The regex you provided for matching URLs is far from being generic enough to match any URL. If it is working in your case, that's fine, else check this question.
It will leave the text after the last matched URL intact. You have to delete it manually.
The answer made previously by #psxls was a great help for me when I have wanted to perform a similar process.
However, this regex rule was written six years ago now: accordingly, I had to adjust / complete / update it in order it can properly work with the some recent links, because:
a lot of URL are now using HTTPS instead of HTTP protocol
many websites less use www as main subdomain
some links adds punctuation mark (which have to be preserved)
I finally reshuffle the search rule to .*?(https?\:\/\/[a-zA-Z0-9[:punct:]]+) and it worked correctly with the file I had.
Unfortunately, this seemingly simple task is going to be almost impossible to do in notepad++. The regex you would have to construct would be...horrible. It might not even be possible, but if it is, it's not worth it. I pretty much guarantee that.
However, all is not lost. There are other tools more suitable to this problem.
Really what you want is a tool that can search through an input file and print out a list of regex matches. The UNIX utility "grep" will do just that. Don't be scared off because it's a UNIX utility: you can get it for Windows:
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/grep.htm
The grep command line you'll want to use is this:
grep -o 'http:\/\/www.[a-zA-Z0-9./-]\+\?' <filename(s)>
(Where <filename(s)> are the name(s) of the files you want to search for URLs in.)
You might want to shake up your regex a little bit, too. The problems I see with that regex are that it doesn't handle URLs without the 'www' subdomain, and it won't handle secure links (which start with https). Maybe that's what you want, but if not, I would modify it thusly:
grep -o 'https\?:\/\/[a-zA-Z0-9./-]\+\?' <filename(s)>
Here are some things to note about these expressions:
Inside a character group, there's no need to quote metacharacters except for [ and (sometimes) -. I say sometimes because if you put the dash at the end, as I have above, it's no longer interpreted as a range operator.
The grep utility's syntax, annoyingly, is different than most regex implementations in that most of the metacharacters we're familiar with (?, +, etc.) must be escaped to be used, not the other way around. Which is why you see backslashes before the ? and + characters above.
Lastly, the repetition metacharacter in this expression (+) is greedy by default, which could cause problems. I made it lazy by appending a ? to it. The way you have your URL match formulated, it probably wouldn't have caused problems, but if you change your match to, say [^ ] instead of [a-zA-Z0-9./-], you would see URLs on the same line getting combined together.
I did this a different way.
Find everything up to the first/next (https or http) (then everything that comes next) up to (html or htm), then output just the '(https or http)(everything next) then (html or htm)' with a line feed/ carriage return after each.
So:
Find: .*?(https:|http:)(.*?)(html|htm)
Replace with: \1\2\3\r\n
Saves looking for all possible (incl non-generic) url matches.
You will need to manually remove any text after the last matched URL.
Can also be used to create url links:
Find: .*?(https:|http:)(.*?)(html|htm)
Replace: \1\2\3\r\n
or image links (jpg/jpeg/gif):
Find: .*?(https:|http:)(.*?)(jpeg|jpg|gif)
Replace: <img src="\1\2\3">\r\n
I know my answer won't be RegEx related, but here is another efficient way to get lines containing URLs.
This won't remove text around links like Toto mentioned in comments.
At least if there is nice pattern to all links, like https://.
CTRL+F => change tab to Mark
Insert https://
Tick Mark to bookmark.
Mark All.
Find => Bookmarks => Delete all lines without bookmark.
I hope someone who lands here in search of same problem will find my way more user-friendly.
You can still use RegEx to mark lines :)
I need to build a RegEx expression which gets its text strings from the Title field of my Database. I.e. the complete strings being searched are: Mr. or Ms. or Dr. or Sr. etc.
Unfortunately this field was a free field and anything could be written into it. e.g.: M. ; A ; CFO etc.
The expression needs to match on everything except: Mr. ; Ms. ; Dr. ; Sr. (NOTE: The list is a bit longer but for simplicity I keep it short.)
WHAT I HAVE TRIED SO FAR:
This is what I am using successfully on on another field:
^(?!(VIP)$).* (This will match every string except "VIP")
I rewrote that expression to look like this:
^(?!(Mr.|Ms.|Dr.|Sr.)$).*
Unfortunately this did not work. I assume this is because because of the "." (dot) is a reserved symbol in RegEx and needs special handling.
I also tried:
^(?!(Mr\.|Ms\.|Dr\.|Sr\.)$).*
But no luck as well.
I looked around in the forum and tested some other solutions but could not find any which works for me.
I would like to know how I can build my formula to search the complete (short) string and matches everything except "Mr." etc. Any help is appreciated!
Note: My Question might seem unusual and seems to have many open ends and possible errors. However the rest of my application is handling those open ends. Please trust me with this.
If you want your string simply to not start with one of those prefixes, then do this:
^(?!([MDS]r|Ms)\.).*$
The above simply ensures that the beginning of the string (^) is not followed by one of your listed prefixes. (You shouldn't even need the .*$ but this is in case you're using some engine that requires a complete match.)
If you want your string to not have those prefixes anywhere, then do:
^(.(?!([MDS]r|Ms)\.))*$
The above ensures that every character (.) is not followed by one of your listed prefixes, to the end (so the $ is necessary in this one).
I just read that your list of prefixes may be longer, so let me expand for you to add:
^(.(?!(Mr|Ms|Dr|Sr)\.))*$
You say entirely of the prefixes? Then just do this:
^(?!Mr|Ms|Dr|Sr)\.$
And if you want to make the dot conditional:
^(?!Mr|Ms|Dr|Sr)\.?$
^
Through this | we can define any number prefix pattern which we gonna match with string.
var pattern = /^(Mrs.|Mr.|Ms.|Dr.|Er.).?[A-z]$/;
var str = "Mrs.Panchal";
console.log(str.match(pattern));
this may do it
/(?!.*?(?:^|\W)(?:(?:Dr|Mr|Mrs|Ms|Sr|Jr)\.?|Miss|Phd|\+|&)(?:\W|$))^.*$/i
from that page I mentioned
Rather than trying to construct a regex that matches anything except Mr., Ms., etc., it would be easier (if your application allows it) to write a regex that matches only those strings:
/^(Mr|Ms|Dr|Sr)\.$/
and just swap the logic for handling matching vs non-matching strings.
re.sub(r'^([MmDdSs][RSrs]{1,2}|[Mm]iss)\.{0,1} ','',name)
I'm converting our MVC3 project to use T4MVC. And I would like to replace java-script includes to work with T4MVC as well. So I need to replace
"~/Scripts/DataTables/TableTools/TableTools.min.js"
"~/Scripts/jquery-ui-1.8.24.min.js"
Into
Scripts.DataTables.TableTools.TableTools_min_js
Scripts.jquery_ui_1_8_24_min_js
I'm using Notepad++ as a regexp tool at the moment, and it is using POSIX regexps.
I can find script name and replace it with these regexps:
Find: \("~/Scripts/(.*)"\)
Replace with \(Scripts.\1\)
But I can't figure out how do I replace dots and dashes in the file names into underscores and replace forward slashes into dots.
I can check that js-filename have dot or dash in a name with this
\("~/Scripts/(?=\.*)(?=\-*).*"\)
But how do I replace groups within a group?
Need to have non-greedy replacement within group, and have these replacements going in an order, so forward slashes converted into a dot will not be converted to underscore afterwards.
This is a non-critical problem, I've already done all the replacements manually, but I thought I'm good with regexp, so this problem bugs me!!
p.s. preferred tool is Notepad++, but any POSIX regexp solution would do -)
p.p.s. Here you can get a sample of stuff to be replaced
And here is the the target text
I would just use a site like RegexHero
You can past the code into the target string box, then place (?<=(~/Script).*)[.-](?=(.*"[)]")) into the Regular Expression box, with _ in the Replacement String box.
Once the replace is done, click on Final String at the bottom, and select Move to target string and start a new expression.
From there, Paste (?<=(<script).*)("~/)(?=(.*[)]" ))|(?<=(Url.).*)(")(?=(.*(\)" ))) into the Regular Expression box and leave the Replacement String box empty.
Once the replace is done, click on Final String at the bottom, and select Move to target string and start a new expression.
From there paste (?<=(Script).*)[/](?=(.*[)]")) into the Regular Expression box and . into the Replacement String box.
After that, the Final String box will have what you are looking for. I'm not sure the upper limits of how much text you can parse, but it could be broken up if that's an issue. I'm sure there might be better ways to do it, but this tends to be the way I go about things like this. One reason I like this site, is because I don't have to install anything, so I can do it anywhere quickly.
Edit 1: Per the comments, I have moved step 3 to Step 5 and added new steps 3 and 4. I had to do it this way, because new Step 5 would have replaced the / in "~/Scripts with a ., breaking the removal of "~/. I also had to change Step 5's code to account for the changed beginning of Script
Here is a vanilla Notepad++ solution, but it's certainly not the most elegant one. I managed to do the transformation with several passes over the file.
First pass
Replace . and - with _.
Find: ("~/Scripts[^"]*?)[.-]
Replace With: \1_
Unfortunately, I could not find a way to match only the . or -, because it would require a lookbehind, which is apparently not supported by Notepad++. Due to this, every time you execute the replacement only the first . or - in a script name will be replaced (because matches cannot overlap). Hence, you have to run this replacement multiple times until no more replacements are done (in your example input, that would be 8 times).
Second pass
Replace / with ..
Find: ("~/Scripts[^"]*?)/
Replace with: \1.
This is basically the same thing as the first pass, just with different characters (you will have to this 3 times for the example file). Doing the passes in this order ensures that no slashes will end up as underscores.
Third pass
Remove the surrounding characters.
Find: "~/(Scripts[^"]*?)"
Replace with: \1
This will now match all the script names that are still surrounded by "~/ and ", capturing what is in between and just outputting that.
Note that by including those surrounding characters in the find patterns of the first two passes, you can avoid converting the . in strings that are already of the new format.
As I said this is not the most convenient way to do it. Especially, since passes one and two have to be executed manually multiple times. But it would still save a lot of time for large files, and I cannot think of a way to get all of them - only in the correct strings - in one pass, without lookbehind capabilities. Of course, I would very much welcome suggestions to improve this solution :). I hope I could at least give you (and anyone with a similar problem) a starting point.
If, as your question indicates, you'd like to use N++ then use N++ Python Script. Setup the script and assign a shortcut key, then you have a single pass solution requiring only to open, modify, and save... can't get much simpler than that.
I think part of the problem is that N++ is not a regex tool and the use of a dedicated regex tool
, or even a search/replace solution, is sometimes warranted. You may be better off, both in speed and in time value using a tool made for text processing vs editing.
[Script Edit]:: Altered to match the modified in/out expectations.
# Substitute & Replace within matched group.
from Npp import *
import re
def repl(m):
return "(Scripts." + re.sub( "[-.]", "_", m.group(1) ).replace( "/", "." ) + ")"
editor.pyreplace( '(?:[(].*?Scripts.)(.*?)(?:"?[)])', repl )
Install:: Plugins -> Plugin Manager -> Python Script
New Script:: Plugins -> Python Script -> script-name.py
Select target tab.
Run:: Plugins -> Python Script -> Scripts -> script-name
[Edit: An extended one-liner PythonScript command]
Having need for the new regex module for Python (that I hope replaces re) I played around and compiled it for use with the N++ PythonScript plugin and decided to test it on your sample set.
Two commands on the console ended up with the correct results in the editor.
import regex as re
editor.setText( (re.compile( r'(?<=.*Content[(].*)((?<omit>["~]+?([~])[/]|["])|(?<toUnderscore>[-.]+)|(?<toDot>[/]+))+(?=.*[)]".*)' ) ).sub(lambda m: {'omit':'','toDot':'.','toUnderscore':'_'}[[ key for key, value in m.groupdict().items() if value != None ][0]], editor.getText() ) )
Very sweet!
What else is really cool about using regex instead of re was that I was able to build the expression in Expresso and use it as is! Which allows for a verbose explanation of it, just by copy-paste of the r'' string portion into Expresso.
The abbreviated text of which is::
Match a prefix but exclude it from the capture. [.*Content[(].*]
[1]: A numbered capture group. [(?<omit>["~]+?([~])[/]|["])|(?<toUnderscore>[-.]+)|(?<toDot>[/]+)], one or more repetitions
Select from 3 alternatives
[omit]: A named capture group. [["~]+?([~])[/]|["]]
Select from 2 alternatives
["~]+?([~])[/]
Any character in this class: ["]
[toUnderscore]: A named capture group. [[-.]+]
[toDot]: A named capture group. [[/]+]
Match a suffix but exclude it from the capture. [.*[)]".*]
The command breakdown is fairly nifty, we are telling Scintilla to set the full buffer contents to the results of a compiled regex substitution command by essentially using a 'switch' off of the name of the group that isn't empty.
Hopefully Dave (the PythonScript Author) will add the regex module to the ExtraPythonLibs part of the project.
Alternatively you could use a script that would do it and avoid copy pasting and the rest of the manual labor altogether. Consider using the following script:
$_.gsub!(%r{(?:"~/)?Scripts/([a-z0-9./-]+)"?}i) do |i|
'Scripts.' + $1.split('/').map { |i| i.gsub(/[.-]/, '_') }.join('.')
end
And run it like this:
$ ruby -pi.bak script.rb *.ext
All the files with extension .ext will be edited in-place and the original files will be saved with .ext.bak extension. If you use revision control (and you should) then you can easily review changes with some visual diff tool, correct them if necessary and commit them afterwards.
Sometimes I want to search and replace in Vim using the s/search_for/replace_with/options format, but the search_for part becomes a complicated regex that I can't get right the first time.
I have set incsearch hlsearch in my .vimrc so Vim will start highlighting as I type when I am searching using the /search_for format. This is useful to first "test"/"preview" my regex. Then once I get the regex I want, I apply to the s/ to search and replace.
But there is two big limitation to this approach:
It's a hassle to copy and paste the regex I created in / mode to s/ mode.
I can't preview with matched groups in regex (ie ( and )) or use the magic mode \v while in /.
So how do you guys on SO try to do complicated regex search and replace in Vim?
Test your regex in search mode with /, then use s//new_value/. When you pass nothing to the search portion of s, it takes the most recent search.
As #Sam Brink also says, you can use <C-r>/ to paste the contents of the search register, so s/<C-r>//new_value/ works too. This may be more convenient when you have a complicated search expression.
As already noted, you can practice the search part with /your-regex-here/. When that is working correctly, you can use s//replacement/ to use the latest search.
Once you've done that once, you can use & to repeat the last s/// command, even if you've done different searches since then. You can also use :&g to do the substitute globally on the current line. And you could use :.,$&g to do the search on all matches between here (.) and the end of the file ($), amongst a legion of other possibilities.
You also, of course, have undo if the operation didn't work as you expected.
As the others have noted I typically use s//replacement/ to do my replacements but you can also use <C-r>/ to paste what is in the search register. So you can use s/<C-r>//replacement/ where the <C-r>/ will paste your search and you can do any last minute changes you want.
<C-r> inserts the contents of a register where the cursor is
The / register holds the most recent search term
:registers will display the contents of every register so you can see whats available.
Since Neovim 0.1.7 there is the Incremental (“live”) :substitute function. (so this only works in Neovim!)
To enable it set the incommand option:
:set inccommand=split
It was announced here: https://neovim.io/news/2016/11/
I am working with legacy systems at the moment, and a lot of work involves breaking up delimited strings and testing against certain rules.
With this string, how could I return "Active" in a back reference and search terms, stopping when it hits the first caret (^)?:
Active^20080505^900^LT^100
Can it be done with an inclusion in the regex of this "(.+)" ? The reason I ask is that the actual regex "(.+)" is defined in a database as cutting up these messages and their associated rules can be set from a front-end system. The content could be anything ('Active' in this case), that's why ".+" has been used in this case.
Rule: The caret sign cannot feature between the brackets, as that would result with it being stored in the database field too, and it is defined elsewhere in another system field.
If you have a better suggestion than "(.+)" will be happy to hear it.
Thanks in advance.
(.+?)\^
Should grab up to the first ^
If you have to include (.+) w/o modifications you could use this:
(.+?)\^(.+)
The first backreference will still be the correct one and you can ignore the second.
A regex is really overkill here.
Just take the first n characters of the string where n is the position of the first caret.
Pseudo code:
InputString.Left(InputString.IndexOf("^"))
^([^\^]+)
That should work if your RE library doesn't support non-greediness.