@Ian-Alex ,

I’m not sure how the find regex you specified worked for you; it did not work for me…I see some obvious problems with it. The big thing is that some of the symbols you are searching for (brackets and braces) have special meaning to the regex engine, and if you want to search for them literally, they have to be “escaped”, that is, preceded with a backslash.

THIS MIGHT EXPLAIN IT: Perhaps when you posted here, you didn’t examine the preview window close enough; sometimes posting on this website gobbles up your intended characters–you have to use the escape/backslash technique here, too!

Regardless, this simplified find and replace pair worked for me on your sample data:

Find what: ^\[.+\]\R\{
Replace with: #$0

Some points to note:

\R is a shorthand line-ending notation, and will match \r\n on Windows

$0 in the replace is a shorthand notation for the entirety of what text matched in the find phase

@Nithin-Gopal-Doddamane

Not really an editor task. If you know a scripting language like AWK, PERL, Python, etc. you should use it.

If you want N lines in each small file you can:

<Ctrl>+G then enter the number N+1
<Ctrl>+<Shift>+<Home>
<Ctrl>+X to cut the first N lines from the big file
<Ctrl>+N to open a new file
<Ctrl>+V to paste the cut lines into the new file
Then save the new file.
<Ctrl>+<Tab> to switch back to the “big” file.
Repeat until done.

Found the link! :
https://notepad-plus-plus.org/community/topic/11637/collapse-function-how-to-copy-just-the-collapsed-results-from-results-window/2

A post in the old Sourceforge forums for Notepad++ explains all, see https://sourceforge.net/p/notepad-plus/discussion/331754/thread/ca059a0a/

It’s inconvenient. (((

@Scott-Sumner In fact, I have done a search before, no result, hope that there is one solution, thank you for your reply =)

Hello Claudia,

I should have answered

I didn’t mean to imply that at all. :)
I appreciate your kindness.

Best of luck with everything.

Also, you can use the NppExec plugin along with your favorite scripting language (AWK, PERL, Python, PHP, etc.) to add extended capabilities to NPP. It takes a bit of work to set it up, but once you do, it opens a lot of doors.

On my context menu I have a Comment submenu that has various forms of comments I can select. They are either applied to the highlighted lines or to the entire file (when nothing is highlighted). To do this I use a combination of NPP Exec and AWK scripts.

I also created the ability to change either ALL or only LEADING tabs into the appropriate number of spaces for the type of file, trim trailing white space, and convert the current “word” into a global variable format I use in the same general manner (NPP Exec and AWK). All these functions work on either the highlighted or all of lines of the file.

@Harry-D

maybe you wanna use the Project panel instead?

Cheers
Claudia

@Anders-Frederiksen

and I find it frustrating that I can’t figure out how to disable the headers (which means I delete and re-set them up all the time)…

why do you reset it up if you want it to be disabled?

Cheers
Claudia

Wow, didn’t know about v7 (and took some minutes to even find it), thanks a lot!