@NolanNolan said in Standard ANSI and code still change to something else:

But really weird that using Microsofts own notepad.exe that comes with a standard windows installation makes windows search not detect characters in txt files that belongs to the installation language of the OS.

Perhaps not quite as strange as it might first appear.

Support for Unicode in Windows dates back to the first release of Windows NT in 1993. (NT was a “business” operating system; it took another eight years or so to get Unicode into “consumer” systems.) The thing is, Windows chose to support 16-bit characters: UCS-2, which later became UTF-16. UTF-8 wasn’t even presented publicly until 1993, and it took many more years for it to become popular. Most early adopters of Unicode, like Windows, used 16-bit “wide” characters.

So, for a long time, in Windows “Unicode” meant UTF-16. Windows XP (2001) introduced code page 65001 for UTF-8, but it was only useful in conversion functions and console sessions. In Windows 10 Version 1903 (May 2019), it became possible to set UTF-8 (65001) as the system code page; however, that doesn’t (yet, in 2025 at least) do as much as you might hope it would, and it can precipitate odd behavior in software. (I tested your specific case: setting Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support does not change how search in Windows Explorer interprets files without a byte order mark.)

Files using legacy (“ANSI”) encodings are too common to ignore, but, as @PeterJones pointed out in his earlier post in this thread, there is no completely reliable way to distinguish an “ANSI” encoding from UTF-8. Windows chose to use the byte order mark (already in use in UTF-16 files) to signal when a file is UTF-8. Windows simply does not recognize a file without a byte order mark as Unicode.

Notepad++ uses byte order marks, too, but it also recognizes when a file has a very high likelihood of being UTF-8 (without a byte order mark). This is possible because the details of UTF-8 encoding make it highly unlikely that a legacy text file will “accidentally” also be a valid UTF-8 file — unless it is very short, has been intentionally crafted to trigger false detection, or contains only ASCII characters. (Since ASCII characters are represented identically in UTF-8 and in legacy code pages, the last case only matters if you edit a file which contained only ASCII characters so that it contains one or more non-ASCII characters. In that case, it is important to set your intended encoding depending on how the file will be used.)

What you’re confronting is the difference between how Windows detects UTF-8 (must have a byte order mark) and how Notepad++ detects UTF-8 (valid UTF-8 byte sequence, which is statistically highly unlikely to be a legacy encoding).

There is no good solution to this without inventing a time machine and changing decisions that were made over three decades ago.

Well… no good solution that does not sacrifice reasonable backward compatibility. I consider that one of Windows’ best features, and I admire Microsoft for sticking to it. Twenty-year old programs can still run on current versions of Windows. I hate the culture of “If it’s not constantly maintained and upgraded, junk it!” that’s overtaken most of the computing world. A job once done well should stay done. (I suspect this has a lot to do with Microsoft’s dominance in business applications.) Not everyone shares my view.

@PeterJones Thank you!

@PeterJones I think I found the culprit behind this.

Looks like I had my Avast autoupdater to ON, and probably it was the reason behind quiet updates for both Notepad++ and my Mozilla Thunderbird 42.

It became a routine for me to reinstall old versions over and over and over agian.

Thank you for your response.

Really appreciate your help and detailed approach.

@guy038 said in How to Print Pretty with missing close tags.:

Let’s start from your solution

I’d hardly call it “my” solution. In that I used your generic find/replace-in-region formula, and plugged in reasonable values for the “variables” from that generic formula. The whole point of that generic formula is to make it really easy for anyone to just plug in their BSR/ESR/FR into the formula, and have it “just work”, without having to optimize or tweak.

If I run, successively,

As @Doctor-Rashir said here, “There are many closed tags”… In other words, it’s not just SONRQ and SIGNOMSGSRQV1, and trying to manually run a separate regular expression for each of the “many closed tags” is thus not practical. That is why I went to a script to automate it.

@PeterJones
Thank you for the reply. Yes, I understood that inference. I was hoping there was additional tweaks to try. Yes, I could do a reply. It was triggered on a very minor edit. Maybe the site support would be interested in the issue. But it’s not important to me now.

@PeterJones

i have to hand it to you this worked, thank you :-)

I couldnt find this description elsewhere, i tested all the 3 thirdparty apps, wthy didnt work though

I seems to have missed the reg addition of defaulticon should be in the string sith notepad++

best Nolan

When the Fill Find Field with Selected Text option, in settings, is unchecked, and the user invokes Select And Find …, perhaps the program should (simply) run the code for the “volatile” version of the command.

(I should have said this in my previous post.)

@Rick-Kosters

You can try the free Agent Ransack utility from https://www.mythicsoft.com
It works with .doc, .docx and .pdf files too.

@me

I printed out a cookie recipe in NP++ and LO Writer

Try to be more explicit. I actually use LibreOffice and, until @PeterJones explicitly stated it in his response, I had no idea what you were talking about when you said “LO”.

@JuergenBelle ,

Further to what @h-jangra said, since N++ v8.8.6, you can just paste your multi-line text into the Replace, and use the Search @h-jangra suggested, and you don’t need the plugin at all…

If your replacement has parentheses () or dollar signs $, it might not work as you expect, so you might have to escape them, as described in the user manual (https://npp-user-manual.org/docs/searching/#substitutions)

@guy038

More good information. Thank you!

Barry

@Alan, listen to @PeterJones when he says to scan your computer for viruses. TextShaping.dll is commonly used in DLL sideloading exploits, and if your executables are trying to call it when it resides in a place it doesn’t belong (your Notepad++ directory), then there’s a good chance your computer has been hacked.

That doesn’t mean you should freak out just yet, just take some steps to ensure that you’re not hacked.

All the gup.exe does is to check if there is a newer version than specified by the string input parameter is available. It does not handle the update itself. You would have to code it for yourself.

For example like this in Powershell 5.1 for the 64bit version of Notepad++.

[string]$ScriptFolder = $PSCommandPath | Split-Path -Parent $Notepad = Get-ItemProperty -LiteralPath 'HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Notepad++' $InstalledVersion = $Notepad.DisplayVersion $UpdateCheck = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://notepad-plus-plus.org/update/getDownloadUrl.php?version=$InstalledVersion" $UpdateCheckAnswer = ([xml]$UpdateCheck.Content).GUP if ($UpdateCheckAnswer.NeedToBeUpdated -eq 'yes') { $Filename = $UpdateCheckAnswer.Location.Split('/')[-1] Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $UpdateCheckAnswer.Location -OutFile "$ScriptFolder\$Filename" & "$ScriptFolder\$Filename" '/S /closeRunningNpp' }

Hi everyone!

I have some good news and bad news.

The good news is that I’ve finished WebEdit 2.9, which includes several new features: multi-select support, tag recommendations, quick tag addition/editing, and a few other minor upgrades.

The bad news is that I’ve actually finished all the essential features I wanted to implement, so I’m not planning any further developments for the time being. Of course, you can still report bugs/issues and even make minor development suggestions, but the goal remains to keep the plugin fast, lightweight and easy to use.

The overview of the (new) features is also available on the module’s main page: https://github.com/Krazal/WebEdit

What’s next: when I have time, I’d like to return to my own plugin, because it has been full of bugs for months (not my fault!). ^^’

Thank you for letting me contribute to this plugin, which I hope others will find just as great and useful as me!

@James-Burke-0 ,
In addition to what @PeterJones has explained, the only other thing you could do, is bring up dBASEPlus in the Language->User Defined Language->Define your language...User language drop down box, and then `Save As’ and give it a new name.

At that point, you can play with the settings, keywords, etc… all you want in your own named UDL. Because of the way the entire UDL ecosystem works, however, you’ll lose the ability to use the autoComplete file and the functionList file as well, because of their links to the UDL’s file names that those work with, as well as the overrideMap.xml linkage file, but you’d have JUST the UDL to adjust to your likings and then when you’re satisfied, you could go back to the original dBASEPlus UDL and put the changes that you want into the Dialog boxes for the language and then do as @PeterJones says, and just close and reopen the editor and your changes will be applied to the intalled dBASEPlus UDL definition.

If you don’t need the Function List or Auto Complete capability, you can just use your newly named version of the dBASEPlus UDL to view and edit dBASE specific files.

Just in case this is what you meant you wanted to do, to customize the dBASEPlus UDL without losing the original functionality of the original package. I hope this helps.

@Jerry-Scannell said in backward search doesn't work any longer:

All of a sudden searching backwards through a file doesn’t work and I have to have proper case for strings I am searching. Does anyone know about this? Is it a setting that has changed for some reason? I am using version 8.7.5 if that helps.
Thanks in advance,
Paul

That setting hasn’t changed since 2020 (v7.8.7).

If you are in Regular Expression search mode, you cannot do backward search, unless you have followed the User Manual instructions (https://npp-user-manual.org/docs/preferences/#preferences-for-advanced-users) to set the regexBackward4PowerUser attribute in the xml config file, and restarted N++.

But, as I said, this is nothing new. So a “sudden change” presumably was you choosing Regular Expression mode.

Thank you guys all so very much, now that I know that it’s a GVAS file, I’ll chase down that lead and try to get somewhere!!!

@Pieter-Hoeben

You probably have the “Search Mode” set to “Regular expression”. Change it to “Normal”.

@James-Burke-0 said in Avoiding Tabbed Spaces:

Is there a toggle for NPP to NOT insert tabbed spaces at the beginning of a line? Somewhere in Preferences, perhaps?

You probably want Settings | Preferences… | Indentation | Indent using: Space character(s).