I want to use a regex to replace some strings in my file. I search for:
%s/^ [a-z]*/ /
what I want to do is to replace every [a-z]* that have 2 whitespaces with the sane [a-z] prepended with 4 whitespaces. Is there any "inplace" replacement or how would I reach that with vim?
With best regards
:%s/ \([a-z]*\)/ \1/g
should do the job; beware of running this multiple times, though because the result of the replace will match the input pattern :)
I find it more straightforward to use the \ze object to define the end of the match:
:%s/ \ze[a-z]*/ /g
so the [a-z]* is not included in the replace, but just used to match the relevant spaces.
Related
This question already has an answer here:
Replace with whole match value using Notepad++ regex search and replace
(1 answer)
Closed 9 months ago.
I've scoured Stack Overflow for something just like this and can't seem to come up with a solution. I've got some text that looks like this:
command.Parameters.Add("#Id
command.Parameters.Add("#IsDeleted
command.Parameters.Add("#MasterRecordId
command.Parameters.Add("#Name
...
And I would like the text to end up like this:
command.Parameters.Add("#Id", acct.Id);
command.Parameters.Add("#IsDeleted", acct.IsDeleted);
command.Parameters.Add("#MasterRecordId", acct.MasterRecordId);
command.Parameters.Add("#Name", acct.Name);
...
As you can see, I essentially want to append the end of the line with: ", acct.<word between # and second ">);
I'm trying this:
Find What: (?<=#).+?(?=\r) - This works, it finds the appropriate word.
Replace: \1", acct.\1); - This doesn't. It changes the line to (for Id):
command.Parameters.Add("#", acct.
Not sure what I'm doing wrong. I thought that \1 is supposed to be the "capture" from the "Find what" box, but it's not I guess?
The \1 backreference will only work if you have a capturing group in your pattern:
(?<=#)(.+?)(?=\r)
If you're not using a capturing group, you should use $& instead of \1 as a backreference for the entire match. Additionally, parentheses in the replacement string need to be escaped. So, the replacement string should be:
$&", acct.$&\);
You might also want to use $ instead of the Lookahead (?=\r) in case the last line isn't followed by an EOL character.
Having said all that, I personally prefer to be more explicit/strict when doing regex substitution to avoid messing up other lines (i.e., false positives). So I would go with something like this:
Find: (\bcommand\.Parameters\.Add\("#)(\w+)$
Replace: \1\2", acct.\2\);
Note that \w will only match word characters, which is likely the desired behavior here. Feel free to replace it with a character class if you think your identifiers might have other characters.
You could also omit the lookbehind, and match the # and then use \K to clear the current match buffer.
Then you can match the rest of the line using .+
Note that you don't have to make the quantifier non greedy .*? as you are matching the rest of the line.
In the replacement, use the full match using $0
See a regex demo for the matches:
Find what:
#\K.+
Replace with:
$0", acct.$0\)
If there must be a newline to the right, you might also write the pattern as one of:
#\K.+(?=\r)
#\K.+(?=\R)
How to find the text between the second and fourth slashes in a path like /folder/subfolder-1/subfolder-2/subfolder-3? I’m trying to replace this with something like /folder/new-folder/subfolder-3.
The most important for me is to be able to find the part after the n-th slash.
I tried the regex /((.*?)/){3}, but it doesn’t work.
Using Match resetter \K meta-character you are able to do it in a simpler way.
Find:
/.*?/\K(.*?/){2}
Replace with:
new-folder/
One way you could to it is by using this string in the pattern to replace
(/.+?)(/.+?){2}(/\S+)
And use this one in your pattern to replace it with
$1/new-folder$3
From your string:
/folder/subfolder-1/subfolder-2/subfolder-3
(/.+?) will match /folder as $1
(/.+?){2} will match /subfolder-1/subfolder-2 as $2 (not used)
(/\S+) will match everything that isn't a space, in this case/subfolder-3 as $3
Leaving you room to insert your new-folder in-between.
How can I just mark till the slash?
Find what: (/[^/]+/)[^/]+/[^/]+
Replace with: $1new-folder
To find text between second and forth slash you can use the regex ^(/[^/]*/)([^/]*/[^/]*) then you can reference to the text between slashes with \2 when replacing the text.
To keep the text before the slashes you can enter something like \1myNewTextBetweenSlashes2and4.
In notepad++ Find by this:
(/[^/]+)(?:/[^/]+/[^/]+/)(.*)
And Replace by this:
\1\/new-folder/\2
Make sure that: .matches newline is not checked
{2} indicates 2 levels after first level will be repalced by new-folder
Find:
(\/.*?\/)(.*?\/){2}(.*)
Replace:
$1new-folder/$3
Demo: https://regex101.com/r/XIA3IN/3
I'm so close to understanding regex. I'm a bit stumped, I thought i understood lazy and greedy.
Here is my current regex: <g_n><!\[CDATA\[([^]]+)(?=]]><\/g_n>)
My current regex makes:
<g_n><![CDATA[xxxxxxxxxx]]></g_n>
match to:
<g_n><![CDATA[xxxxxxxxxx
But I want to make it match like this:
xxxxxxxxxx
You want
<g_n><!\[CDATA\[(.*?)]]></g_n>
then if you want to replace it use
\1
in the replacement box
Your matching the whole string, the brackets around the .*? match all of that and put it in the \1 variable
So the match will be all of the string with \1 referring to what you want
To change the xxxxx
Regex :
(<g_n><![CDATA[)(?:.*?)(]]></g_n>)
Replacement
\1WHAT YOU WANT TO CHANGE TO\2
It looks like you need to add escape slashes to the two closing square brackets, as they are literals from the string you're parsing.
<g_n><!\[CDATA\[.*+?\]\]><\/g_n>
^ ^
Any square brackets not being escaped by backslashes will be treated as regex operational brackets, which in this case won't catch the input string.
EDIT, I think the +? is redundant.
\[.*\]\]> ...
should suffice, since .* means any character, any amount of times.
Tested with notepad++ 6.3.2:
find: (<g_n><!\[CDATA\[)([^]]+)(?=]]></g_n>)
replace: $1WhatYouWant
You can replace + by * in the pattern to match void CDATA:
<g_n><![CDATA[]]></g_n>
I need to replace this statement in a named.conf with regex
masters {
10.11.2.1;
10.11.2.2;
};
All my approaches with sed/vi do not work
%s/masters.*\}\;//g
does not match. Also tried with /s \s etc to match the newline.
In vim, you can force a pattern to match across newlines with \_, for example:
%s/masters {\_[^}]*};//g
It's important to replace .* with something more conservative like [^}]* if you prefix with \_, because * is greedy, so \_.* will try to match everything to the end of the document.
To find and replace all instances of a word in vim, I use
%s/word/newword/g
How do I change this so that it only finds instances of "word" that are whole words?
You can use \< to match the beginning of a word and \> to match the end:
%s/\<word\>/newword/g
For case-sensitive replace.. you can use "\C"
:%s/\<word\>\C/newword/g
It replaces only "word" with newword leaving others like Word,WORD... unreplaced.
For PCRE compatible search and replace, you can use the perldo or rubydo commands as described here: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Perl_compatible_regular_expressions
For example:
:perldo s/\bword\b/newword/g