I have many text files, and I need to add some text (e.g. MNP) to the beginning of the first line in each file.
How can I do this in Notepad++?
(I'm using v6.6.9)
Make sure to backup your work beforehand, and set proper extension of files to affect and folder to search through before you do this.
You can use regular expressions. Several places around the internet claim that the regex \A works, but it wasn't working for me, it was cycling byte by byte through. I found that \A^ sticks to 0 position of the file.
Oddly, I additionally found that I couldn't replace \A or \A^ and have it take effect. This is what worked for me.
Find: \A^(.*?)
Replace MNP\1
Truthfully, the \1 in Replace isn't even necessary since I'm cheating and basically telling notepad to look for 0 characters.
This should work just as well.
Find: \A^.*?
Replace MNP
Please backup your work beforehand though.
Alternatively, this also seems to work.
Find: .{0}(.*)
Replace: MNP\1
It effectively looks for 0 characters followed by the whole document/line (depending on whether . matches newline is checked, this choice won't matter for the outcome however).
Related
Sometimes I find myself editing a C source file which sees both use of tab as four spaces, and regular tab.
Is there any tool that attempts to parse the file and "normalize" this, i.e. convert all occurrences of four spaces to regular tab, or all occurrences of tab to four spaces, to keep it consistent?
I assume something like this can be done even with just a simple vim one-liner?
There's :retab and :retab! which can help, but there are caveats.
It's easier if you're using spaces for indentation, then just set 'expandtab' and execute :retab, then all your tabs will be converted to spaces at the appropriate tab stops (which default to 8.) That's easy and there are no traps in this method!
If you want to use 4 space indentation, then keep 'expandtab' enabled and set 'softtabstop' to 4. (Avoid modifying the 'tabstop' option, it should always stay at 8.)
If you want to do the inverse and convert to tabs instead, you could set 'noexpandtab' and then use :retab! (which will also look at sequences of spaces and try to convert them back to tabs.) The main problem with this approach is that it won't just consider indentation for conversion, but also sequences of spaces in the middle of lines, which can cause the operation to affect strings inside your code, which would be highly undesirable.
Perhaps a better approach for replacing spaces with tabs for indentation is to use the following substitute command:
:%s#^\s\+#\=repeat("\t", indent('.') / &tabstop).repeat(" ", indent('.') % &tabstop)#
Yeah it's a mouthful... It's matching whitespace at the beginning of the lines, then using the indent() function to find the total indentation (that function calculates indentation taking tab stops in consideration), then dividing that by the 'tabstop' to decide how many tabs and how many spaces a specific line needs.
If this command works for you, you might want to consider adding a mapping or :command for it, to keep it handy. For example:
command! -range=% Retab <line1>,<line2>s#^\s\+#\=repeat("\t", indent('.') / &tabstop).repeat(" ", indent('.') % &tabstop)
This also allows you to "Retab" a range of the file, including one you select with a visual selection.
Finally, one last alternative to :retab is that to ask Vim to "reformat" your code completely, using the = command, which will use the current 'indentexpr' or other indentation configurations such as 'cindent' to completely reindent the block. That typically respects your 'noexpandtab' and 'smarttabstop' options, so it use tabs and spaces for indentation consistently. The downside of this approach is that it will completely reformat your code, including changing indentation in places. The upside is that it typically has a semantic understanding of the language and will be able to take that in consideration when reindenting the code block.
I'm trying to come up with a regex for enforcing Git commit messages to match a certain format. I've been banging my head against the keyboard modifying the semi-working version I have, but I just can't get it to work exactly as I want. Here's what I have now:
/^([a-z]{2,4}-[\d]{2,5}[, \n]{1,2})+\n{1}^[\w\n\s\*\-\.\:\'\,]+/i
Here's the text I'm trying to enforce:
AB-1432, ABC-435, ABCD-42
Here is the multiline description, following a blank
line after the Jira issue IDs
- Maybe bullet points, with either dashes
* Or asterisks
Currently, it matches that, but it will also match if there's no blank line after the issue IDs, and if there's multiple blank lines after.
Is there anyway to enforce that, or will I just have to live with it?
It's also pretty ugly, I'm sure there's a more succinct way to write that out.
Thanks.
Your regex allows for \n as one of the possible characters after the required newline, so that's why it matches when there are multiple.
Here's a cleaned up regex:
/^([a-z]{2,4}-\d{2,5}(?=[, \n]),? ?\n?)+^\n([-\w\s*.:',]+\n)+/i
Notes:
This requires at least one [-\w\s*.:',] character before the next newline.
I changed the issue IDs to have one possible comma, space, and newline, in that order (up to one of each). Can you use lookaheads? If so, I added (?=[, \n]) to make sure the issue ID is followed by at least one of those characters.
Also notice that many of the characters don't need to be escaped in a character class.
How should I use 'sed' command to find and replace the given word/words/sentence without considering any of them as the special character?
In other words hot to treat find and replace parameters as the plain text.
In following example I want to replace 'sagar' with '+sagar' then I have to give following command
sed "s/sagar/\\+sagar#g"
I know that \ should be escaped with another \ ,but I can't do this manipulation.
As there are so many special characters and theie combinations.
I am going to take find and replace parameters as input from user screen.
I want to execute the sed from c# code.
Simply, I do not want regular expression of sed to use. I want my command text to be treated as plain text?
Is this possible?
If so how can I do it?
While there may be sed versions that have an option like --noregex_matching, most of them don't have that option. Because you're getting the search and replace input by prompting a user, you're best bet is to scan the user input strings for reg-exp special characters and escape them as appropriate.
Also, will your users expect for example, their all caps search input to correctly match and replace a lower or mixed case string? In that case, recall that you could rewrite their target string as [Ss][Aa][Gg][Aa][Rr], and replace with +Sagar.
Note that there are far fewer regex characters used on the replacement side, with '&' meaning "complete string that was matched", and then the numbered replacment groups, like \1,\2,.... Given users that have no knowledge or expectation that they can use such characters, the likelyhood of them using is \1 in their required substitution is pretty low. More likely they may have a valid use for &, so you'll have to scan (at least) for that and replace with \&. In a basic sed, that's about it. (There may be others in the latest gnu seds, or some of the seds that have the genesis as PC tools).
For a replacement string, you shouldn't have to escape the + char at all. Probably yes for \. Again, you can scan your user's "naive" input, and add escape chars as need.
Finally if you're doing this for a "package" that will be distributed, and you'll be relying on the users' version of sed, beware that there are many versions of sed floating around, some that have their roots in Unix/Linux, and others, particularly of super-sed, that (I'm pretty sure) got started as PC-standalones and has a very different feature set.
IHTH.
Notepad++ obviously recognizes all comments as such. Is there a way to simply delete all?
Edit: Stat-R's bookmark method has helped greatly, not only for removing comments but for conditionally removing lines in general.
For a general file, first of all you need to know the comment operator of the language you are writing the file in. For example, in java script the comment operator is //.
For the following code...
In NP++, you need to
Mark the lines that contains '//'. Make sure the bookmark option is enabled.
Then, choose from NP++ menu Search>Bookmark>Remove Bookmarked lines
EDIT:
Another solution after #Chris Mirno 's suggestion is as follows:
Use regular expression. See the image below. It is self explanatory
To understand it better, refer to these
In the Find & Replace Dialog, put the following regex and adjust the search options as depicted.
/\*.*?\*/
Replace with: (empty)
Select Mode: Regular Expression AND .(dot) matches newline
This should remove all your C style comments spanned across lines.
Star-R and Chris Mirno Answer are also Correct and Good.
But For Line Comment:
//.*?(?=\r?$)
Explanation:
// will be the Starting Position
.*? Will be any character
(?=\r?$) will search to the end of the line (as it is required in line comment)
Note:
But Still check each of the line because for example if your code contains soap format like
//www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance\x2......");
it will capture this line because the starting is // and it goes to end of the line so watch out for this :)
Warning to all using Stat-R's solution:
This method will remove lines of code if formatted like this:
echo "hello"; //This comment will be detected
Following his method, the entire line will be removed.
Therefore make sure to go through and make these comments, their own line before doing this method.
I have had some luck running a macro for the above. Basically:
search for // (F3)
select to end of line (shift+end)
delete (delete)
Put // into the search dialog by just searching for it once. Then record the three steps in a macro, then play it back until EOF.
The first time I did it I had a problem, but then it worked, not sure what I did differently.
Anton Largiader's answer was the most reliable one, including complex inline comments.
However, it will leave many empty lines, including ones with empty characters (space, tabs...) so I would just add another step to make it almost perfect:
After running the macro, just do:
Edit > Line Operations > Remove Empty Lines
OR
Edit > Line Operations > Remove Empty Lines (Containing Blank Characters)
1st option is good if you wish to remove only really empty lines
2nd options will remove every empty line even containing space etc. so there will be no more actual spacing left between code blocks. 1st option might be the safest with some manual cleanup afterwards.
As someone suggested in another post, the simplest and most reliable is maybe to export the all text in .RTF format using Menu Plugin-->NppExport-->Export to RTF and then:
-Open the newly created file in Word
-Select any part of any comment
-On the top-right side of Word clic Select--> Select all texts with similar formatting
-Remove the selected comments all at once (del or cut if doesn't work)
To remove Powershell comments if someone find it handy:
Removing Comment in a Powershell using Notepad ++
To find just lines beginning with # (and not with # elsewhere in the line).
Notepad++ SEARCH Menu > Find
‘Mark‘ Tab – fill in as below.
Select ‘Mark All’ (clear all marks if used previously).
Regex ^[#}
enter image description here
SEARCH Menu > bookmark > Remove (or do anything on the list with
them)
Clear all marks to reset
You can select no comments just code by doing the following:
Regex ^[^#}
enter image description here
Enter ctrl+shift+K to remove comment
I have been looking at regular expressions to try and do this, but the most I can do is find the start of a line with ^, but not replace it.
I can then find the first characters on a line to replace, but can not do it in such a way with keeping it intact.
Unfortunately I don´t have access to a tool like cut since I am on a windows machine...so is there any way to do what I want with just regexp?
Use notepad++. It offers a way to record an sequence of actions which then can be repeated for all lines in the file.
Did you try replacing the regular expression ^ with the text you want to put at the start of each line? Also you should use the multiline option (also called m in some regex dialects) if you want ^ to match the start of every line in your input rather than just the first.
string s = "test test\ntest2 test2";
s = Regex.Replace(s, "^", "foo", RegexOptions.Multiline);
Console.WriteLine(s);
Result:
footest test
footest2 test2
I used to program on the mainframe and got used to SPF panels. I was thrilled to find a Windows version of the same editor at Command Technology. Makes problems like this drop-dead simple. You can use expressions to exclude or include lines, then apply transforms on just the excluded or included lines and do so inside of column boundaries. You can even take the contents of one set of lines and overlay the contents of another set of lines entirely or within column boundaries which makes it very easy to generate mass assignments of values to variables and similar tasks. I use Notepad++ for most stuff but keep a copy of SPFSE around for special-purpose editing like this. It's not cheap but once you figure out how to use it, it pays for itself in time saved.