Regex – Using regular expressions to do mass replace in Notepad++ and Vim

notepad++regexvim

So I've got a big text file which looks like the following:

<option value value='1' >A
<option value value='2' >B
<option value value='3' >C
<option value value='4' >D

It's several hundred lines long and I really don't want to do it manually. The expression that I'm trying to use is:

<option value='.{1,}' >

Which is working as intended when i run it through several online regular expression testers. I basically want to remove everything before A, B, C, etc. The issue is when I try to use that expression in Vim and Notepad++, it can't seem to find anything.

Best Solution

In Notepad++ you don't need to use Regular Expressions for this.

Hold down alt to allow you to select a rectangle of text across multiple rows at once. Select the chunk you want to be rid of, and press delete.

Use `\r` instead of `\n`.

Substituting by \n inserts a null character into the text. To get a newline, use \r. When searching for a newline, you’d still use \n, however. This asymmetry is due to the fact that \n and \r do slightly different things:

\n matches an end of line (newline), whereas \r matches a carriage return. On the other hand, in substitutions \n inserts a null character whereas \r inserts a newline (more precisely, it’s treated as the input CR). Here’s a small, non-interactive example to illustrate this, using the Vim command line feature (in other words, you can copy and paste the following into a terminal to run it). xxd shows a hexdump of the resulting file.

echo bar > test
(echo 'Before:'; xxd test) > output.txt
vim test '+s/b/\n/' '+s/a/\r/' +wq
(echo 'After:'; xxd test) >> output.txt
more output.txt

Before:
0000000: 6261 720a                                bar.
After:
0000000: 000a 720a                                ..r.

In other words, \n has inserted the byte 0x00 into the text; \r has inserted the byte 0x0a.

Javascript – jQuery selector regular expressions

You can use the filter function to apply more complicated regex matching.

Here's an example which would just match the first three divs:

$('div')
  .filter(function() {
    return this.id.match(/abc+d/);
  })
  .html("Matched!");

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.3.1/jquery.min.js"></script>

<div id="abcd">Not matched</div>
<div id="abccd">Not matched</div>
<div id="abcccd">Not matched</div>
<div id="abd">Not matched</div>

Best Solution

Related Solutions

How to replace a character by a newline in Vim

Use \r instead of \n.

Javascript – jQuery selector regular expressions

Related Question

Use `\r` instead of `\n`.