@Mark-McCall

may I ask you what exactly you are trying to solve?
Is it about being sure to always have a standardized xml file?
If so, have you considered using xslt instead?
Or do you need a generic way to reorder the tags based on your current requirements?

@Ken-aRf

While it doesn’t highlight the character itself, I would suggest using the vertical edge feature:

5772c6e2-7374-4588-a0bb-30035efab919-image.png

This forms a nice “bracketing” of the columns you are interested in.

@Ignus666 ,

As always, showing your ?-menu Debug Info will help.

I am assuming you used the “installer” rather than the “portable”. If this is wrong, this advice won’t work exactly as written.

The Plugins Admin tool does ship with Notepad++ v7.9.5, so something went wrong with your installation.

I don’t know why it wouldn’t have been installed properly, but the only way I could reproduce your problem was to get rid of the <installdir>\Plugins\Config\nppPluginList.dll (or more drastically, remove its whole containing folder – probably c:\Program Files\Notepad++\Plugins\Config\nppPluginList.dll, but it depends on 32/64-bit and whether you changed the default location.)

If you use the normal installer, I think the easiest way to get it back would be to re-install. Make sure you get the installer from the official https://notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads/v7.9.5/ location – do not trust whatever downloader you currently have, because it messed up.

If reinstalling from the official installer doesn’t work, the ?-menu Debug Info will give you the path for the Notepad++ executable. Go into its folder. Make sure plugins exists; make sure plugins\Config exists. If so, then download the appropriate portable version (either 32bit or 64bit, to match your normal installer bit-value), and unzip the nppPluginList.dll into the location mentioned earlier.

@PeterJones
@Alan-Kilborn
@dinkumoil

Thank you all for the very detailed information and explanation of why it doesn’t work anymore. I wasn’t expecting so much.
np++ is the best editor I’ve used in my 20 years as a PeopleSoft developer. I look forward to the left-padding setting, but will give startup.py a shot for now.
-Adam

Hello, @darkenb, @alan-kilborn, @peterjones, @ekopalypse and All,

@darkenb :

Regarding the B and D regex S/R, note that I didn’t explain fully how they work. I do think that you need to learn basic regex concepts first, before trying to understand these complicated syntaxes which would just confuse you ;-)

To All,

Regarding the A and C regex S/R, they can be simplified and we do not need to use conditional regexes ! Indeed :

Regex S/R A :

SEARCH (\x5b)|(\x5d)

REPLACE \1_\2

Regex S/R C :

SEARCH (\x5b)_|_(\x5d)

REPLACE \1\2

As you can see, the opening square bracket \x5b is stored as group 1 and the ending square bracket \x5d is stored as group 2. And, as the two alternatives are mutually exclusive, we can write, both, \1 and \2 in the replacement zone ( or $1 and $2 ). We know that when one is defined, the other one is undefined and equivalent to an empty string ;-))

Best Regards,

guy038

@Adriano-Ellero How has your experience been with the Tidy2 solution since you posted Nov 11, 2020? I’ve integrated cmd line Tidy into my process and have no complaints about the output, just that it’s another set of chicanes between me and the finish line. Your initial assessment of the plugin had a caveat.

Hi, @alan-kilborn,

Regarding the regex syntax 1{2, this is considered as a pure literal expression, which correctly matches the 1{2 string

But if you want to match the literal string 1{2}, as this syntax has the regex meaning : “two consecutive digits” 1, we need to escape the opening brace, {, only ( so 1\{2}1\{2} ) to get a literal expression !

As defined here

All characters are treated as literals, except for characters $, \, (, ), ?, and :

If you want to write the $ ? and the : characters, literally, you do not need, most of the time, to escape them because they are usually found outside their meaning context !

However, the three characters (, ) and \ must always be escaped, in the replacement zone, in order to be written literally !

Parentheses are normally used for lexical grouping in conditional expressions, with these syntaxes :

(?DigitTrue_Exp) or (?{Digit}True_Exp) or (?NameTrue_Exp)

(?DigitTrue_Exp:False_Exp) or (?{Digit}True_Exp:False_Exp) or (?NameTrue_Exp:False_Exp)

Apart from these cases, these two parentheses seem to just represent a pure empty string !

For instance :

SEARCH DEF

REPLACE 123(456 or REPLACE 123()456

would change the string ABCDEFGHI into ABC123456GHI

And the S/R :

SEARCH : DEF REPLACE : 123( (((XYZ)OP(QRS)TUV ()) )789 would change the string "ABCDEFGHI" into "ABC123 XYZOPQRSTUV 789GHI"

Thus, the S/R :

SEARCH DEF

REPLACE ()

would change the string ABCDEFGHI into ABCGHI ! In other words, the () syntax, in the replacement zone, seems to be a synonym of an empty string ;-)

However, note that :

SEARCH DEF

REPLACE 123)456 or REPLACE 123)456(789

would change the string ABCDEFGHI into ABC123GHI only !

Now, placing some replacement meta-characters, inside parentheses, does not make them literal and they keep these normal behavior :

For instance, the regex S/R :

SEARCH (DEF)|XYZ

REPLACE ---(123(?1TRUE:FALSE)456\\789)---

would change the string ABCDEFGHI ABCXYZGHI into ABC---123TRUE456\789---GHI ABC---123FALSE456\789---GHI

Finally, the only practical application I found of using parentheses, is when you want to delimit a string beginning and/or ending with space characters !

Best Regards,

guy038

Thank you very much!
I used your last resolution: Find: (?-s)^1 NAME.*\K/((?:\S+\h+)) and replace with $1/
it worked perfect!

For people searching for this, i used it for batch editing a raw gedcom com familytree file.
In older familytree software the firstname patronym and surname was noted differently so in a modern gedcom file the patronym would end op in the surname field.
using notepad++ you can edit the raw gedcom file and with find and replace you can move the slash from the patronym to the surname.
In this case it was a lifework from an old geneologist of 170.000 persons in a gedcom which was almost obsolete if this was not solved.
Peter Jones thank you very much.

I forget to add how the image looks 3.jpg

So for future people that come along looking maybe for a solution to something, and seeing this post, I say: It has several pieces of misinformation.

First, the “spec” was:

add something to the beginning of each line that does not contain the sign -

In fact, the regex supplied does not do this. What it does is: Add something to the beginning of each line that does not start with -.

Second, the OP diagnosed a problem as being that:

There was no need for \ before -

In fact, the removal of \ did nothing to change the outcome of the replacement operation. - does not need to be “escaped” in the usage shown by the OP. While it was true that there was “no need”, it didn’t make the first regex not work. The two regexes supplied by the OP do exactly the same thing.

Maybe, report a bug to Hex Editor also?

@Brian-D Do you have this Hide extensions option ON by any chance?
de64cd6e-f60b-4671-9ca8-89c2638c82b1-image.png

@Alan-Kilborn said in HTML colors in proper colors:

Did the earlier code run too slowly?
I ask because it seemed to process only what was on-screen to a user as opposed to the whole-file.
… maybe you encountered some other difficulty relating to it.

With my 90-color example, where I had multiple instances of those same 90 color blocks, as I would scroll up and down the file, it would slow down my scrolling as it kept redrawing the screen for every line of movement (ie, every time the UPDATEUI notification was triggered). That was annoying to me. My whole-file-once approach took 2-5sec to do the whole file, but then I could scroll to my heart’s content; the notification-based one-screen solution took <1s per screen, but it cost that same amount of time every scroll action; scrolling more than a few lines or a few times would quickly move the higher efficiency from one-page to color-once-then-move-freely.

If I were editing a large HTML file (I don’t do that – I am just doing this because it is interesting and I had an idea I wanted to try), I think I would prefer colorizing the whole thing, on demand. If I were trying to decide which color to put in the HTML/CSS, the NppQCP would be a better option, because you could start with what you have, then tweak the value in the plugin. But if I just want a quick visual reference of what color each of those are as I’m editing other things in my HTML/CSS, I wouldn’t need to refresh it often, and doing the whole document one time would mean I could scroll throughout the document without further delays.

To each his own, I guess. If someone wanted an on-demand-but-just-the-visible-screen, the start_position and end_position values could go back to the visible-line-start/ends that were in my first gist.

Since I was implementing this more for my own learning than to help the OP, I decided to implement it in the way that would most likely match the way I might use the feature in the future. And both gists are still there, so either are available for direct use or for taking and editing to match one’s own use-case.

I said,

It may already be changed in the gist by the time you get here.

It’s changed now, BTW.

My macro:
stand on beginning of Leicester
start recording
shift-end
ctrl-c
end
space
delete
end
space
delete
home
down arrow
ctrl-v
end
enter
up arrow
stop recording

replay recording
replay recording
replay recording
replay recording
replay recording
…

end up with extra Leicester to delete.

A simpler approach would be to just merge every 2 lines and then add the common prefix with column editing.

@Darius-Runge ,

I am glad that Notepad++ works for your dot matrix. I don’t think the developers do anything special to support that.

I don’t know a lot of the behind-the-scenes in modern printing, but Notepad++ presumably shoots text data and font information (font name, size, weight, and color) at the driver, and the Windows printer driver for your printer presumably translates that into the right data for your individual printer.

My guess is that characters-per-line (ie, page width) is a setting of your printer driver. Actually, it’s probably physical page width, rather than characters-per-line. For example, using the Microsoft Print to PDF driver that I get with MSOffice at work, I printed the same document twice from Notepad++: the first time, I did it in normal portrait orientation, and got about 82 characters of actual text (plus my line numbers in the left margin); I then did a second print in landscape (wide) orientation and got at least 20 more characters per line. So I think the printer driver tells Notepad++ “I have this much width”, and when Notepad++ then sends the data to the printer driver, Notepad++ uses that much width before wrapping the data.

So, when you use File > Print from Notepad++, instead of immediately hitting Print from the dialog, try the Preferences, and see if you can define a page size that more accurately matches your actual paper size (or the effective paper size that Notepad++ should see to make use of the full width of your printer) – you might have to go into Advanced after choosing Preferences.

@sesa150162 ,

Unfortunately, the § is at codepoint U+00A7, which is outside the range that UDL officially supports (it is only guaranteed to work with U+0020 to U+007F). There have been at least two issues (#6014 and #8562) requesting Unicode support in UDL, but UDL doesn’t get much attention, so they remain open.

As a workaround, you can add extra highlighting to a builtin lexer or to your User Defined Language (UDL) using regexes via the script EnhanceAnyLexer.py that @Ekopalypse shares in his github repo. Since the matching is done on the Python side, it has full Python 2.7 support for Unicode strings, so you should be able to define your regex inside that script like u'§\w+§' or maybe r'§\w+§'

@Ryan-Massey ,

Sorry for the long delay in reply.

\appdata\roaming\notepad++\plugins\NppFTP.xml

Was that a typo for

...\appdata\roaming\notepad++\plugins\config\NppFTP\NppFTP.xml

or did you really expect the NppFTP.xml file to be at the top level of the plugins folder?

But that said, I doubt that’s your real problem. I don’t know anything in the installer/upgrade process for the Notepad++ app itself that would wipe out your previous plugins config – I’ve never seen that happen.

Unfortunately, if it has happened, there’s not much we can do to recover it. Recuva or other file-recovery software might help, but we’re not experts on such software here. (But if you only had a few, it’s probably easier just to rebuild the list inside NppFTP.)

@Jennifer-Rumford ,

Are these files that you saved frequently, or did you leave them in an unsaved state, and just trusted that Notepad++ (and Windows) would keep them from disappearing over the long run?

The best way to avoid losing your data is to save frequently and to have your drive backed up regularly.

To recover lost data:

If you have Settings > Preferences > Backup > ☑ Enable session snapshot and periodic backup when the checkbox marked on, then the folder it shows* will hold the most recently saved versions of unsaved files. (*: most likely c:\users\username\AppData\Roaming\Notepad++\backup, or whatever %AppData%\Notepad++\backup 🛈 resolves to on your setup) If even those copies don’t have the missing data, then you might need to run Recuva or other file-recovery software, both on the “real” location of your file and on the backup folder mentioned above, to see if you can recover previous versions.

@Marty-Kay ,

Do you mean you want the wide spacing caused by a tab 998c9948-6520-4e33-82bb-5127b934b70c-image.png to be collapsed to something narrower when printing? There’s no real way to do that, as far as I know.

Or do you mean that you have View > Show Symbol > View White Space and TAB enabled, and when you print, you see the → placeholder f3a01f4f-4dbf-4e44-969e-2a6089bc2adb-image.png To disable that, the easiest way is to turn off View White Space and TAB before printing.

Hello, @meтe-ялчынкая and All,

Very easy with regular expressions or bookmarks !

A) With bookmarks :

Open the Mark dialog ( Ctrl + M )

SEARCH #

Untick all the options

Tick the Bookmark line option

Tick the Wrap around option

Click on the Mark All button

Then, run the menu option Search > Bookmark > Remove Bookmarked Lines

B) With regular expressions ( faster ! )

Open the Replace dialog ( Ctrl + H )

SEARCH (?-s)^.*#.*\R

REPLACE Leave EMPTY

Untick all the options

Tick the Wrap around option

Click on the Replace All button

The search regex searches, from beginning of line ( ^ ) for any range of standard characters, even none ( .* ), followed with a # char, and again, with any range of standard characters, even none( .* ), till the EOL characters of current line ( \R )

Best regards

guy038