Hi, @sakijhon, @Terry-R and All,

I understood why I wrongly supposed that it could be some spaces, at end of fields. Just because, analyzing the initial OP’s lines, with the TextFX option Line up multiple lines by (Clipboard Character), the plugin added some space chars to get all : separators aligned. And somehow, I probably used pieces of text containing these blank chars :-((

So, Terry, you’re right and, probably, blank characters do not exist before or after semicolons, in the OP’s text. Thus, the search regex can be simplified as below. Note, also, that the replacement remain unchanged :-))

SEARCH (?-s)^(.+?:){6}((.+?):){3}.+

REPLACE \1\3

Wow ! We just have learned a useful rule, regarding delimiter-separated format files :-))

Let’s imagine, for instance, a file, containing, exactly, 12 fields, with the ! exclamation mark as a delimiter char.

Now, let’s suppose that you would extract the 3rd, 5th, 6th and 11th fields, only, from that file

So, we start with this sample text :

3.00000!0.0009900000!S!{0}!frankgotti@me.com!frankie!Tucson!456789!student!marketing!approved!last field, line 1 3.50000!0.3010299957!C!{2}!chary@hotmail.com!charoty!!orth_Oracle!567234!notstudent!mathematics!disapproved!last field, line 2 3.75000!0.6020500913!S!{2}!tytarty@yagoo.com!tiagonne!Mission_District!126789!teacher!course_algebra!teacher!last field, line 3

We, first do simple subtractions in order to determine all the coefficients, used as quantifiers, in the regex :

Fld | Qtf 3 - 0 = 3 \ 5 - 3 = 2 \ 6 - 5 = 1 \ 11 - 6 = 5

This leads to these correct regexes :

SEARCH (?-s)^(.+?!){3}(.+?!){2}(.+?!)((.+?)!){5}.+

REPLACE \1\2\3\5

OR

SEARCH (?-s)^(.+?!){3}(.+?!){2}(.+?!)(?:(.+?)!){5}.+

REPLACE \1\2\3\4

And… we get the expected results :

S!frankgotti@me.com!frankie!approved C!chary@hotmail.com!charoty!disapproved S!tytarty@yagoo.com!tiagonne!teacher

Et voilà !

Cheers,

guy038

P.S. :

In case of unwanted space characters, right before or after any separator, it is more sensible to do the preliminary S/R, below :

SEARCH \x20+Separator\x20+

REPLACE Separator

@Serpens66 said:

that was not what I asked

Ah, I see that now. It was my misunderstanding that you were trying to press the Close toolbar button but were hitting the Close All toolbar button instead. Sorry for that, I guess I read your original posting too quickly.

But, really, if you are going to accidentally hit a toolbar button rather than a file-buffer’s tab (something I have never accidentally done), then perhaps you should simply turn the toolbar OFF as it sounds like you are in peril of accidentally activating ANY toolbar function and not only the Close All one. Turning off the toolbar can be done in the preferences.

@Scott-Robertson
Thank you for updating the situation. Now I also know something new about NPP.

Terry

This is not the right place to report a bug, you should follow this FAQ Desk entry to do that.

What I can tell you is that there is a plugin called SaveAsAdmin which, when installed, lets you store files even at locations protected by the OS. The plugin is obtainable via Plugin Manager (Notepad++ prior to v7.6) and Plugin Admin (Notepad++ v7.6 and higher).

Search for: ([.:=*]) +
Replace with: \1\r\n

@Stephen-Yorke
I have now created a regex that will only target commas (,) outside of quoted fields.
So we have (use search mode as regular expression and wraparound ticked).
Find What:,\h*(?![^,]+”)
Replace With:| <----- note there is a space after the | character. This is to put a space after every |.

After running that you then can remove all quotes. I haven’t given you the regex for that, I will leave that for you to do, it is a very easy one to create.

Give it a go and let us know if it suits your needs. Although your 4th field is quoted, this will work on leaving ANY field alone if quoted.

Terry

@guy038 G’dam’ m’man! That’s a niiiiice find. Thank thee! :D. Much obliged’n’all :). And if you wonder why I wrote “G’dam’ m’man!” that way, just listen to https://open.spotify.com/track/1jGvgQkqQtNVj725vg26Ft (it’s an anti-racist song :) ).

… for example, I took a document I happened to have open, printed it to PDF using PDFCreator, and it was fine. I then changed to “VIM Dark Blue” theme, and printed to PDF, and it was still fine.

Debug Info =

Notepad++ v7.5.8 (32-bit) Build time : Jul 23 2018 - 02:03:53 Path : C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\notepad++.exe Admin mode : OFF Local Conf mode : OFF OS : Windows 10 (64-bit) Plugins : ComparePlugin.dll dbgpPlugin.dll DSpellCheck.dll MarkdownViewerPlusPlus.dll NppConverter.dll NppExec.dll NppFTP.dll PluginManager.dll PreviewHTML.dll PythonScript.dll XMLTools.dll mimeTools.dll NppExport.dll

Thank you very much

@Brandon-Tibbitts

You can’t do arithmetic in this (regex) manner. You’re going to need a programming language for that, or perhaps, since you appear to have .csv files, pulling the data into Excel to do the math would work. Good luck.

Hello, @terry-grafff, and All,

Oh, unfortunately, how right you are ! All these advert breaks, pre and post-shows are really a calamity :-((( On French TV, as everywhere else I suppose, they tend to increase, year after year !

We still have, on Net, the possibility to just get, on very few sites, the Knowledge, but for how long ?

Cheers,

guy038

@Scott-Sumner

Ahh, much more innocent. ;-)

@Roland-Haddad

See here.

@Danilo-Schembri

your regex works for me

Find: ([A-Z]) ([A-Z])
Replace: \1_\2
`Search Mode: Regular Expression

gives me

FIELD_ONE
FIELD_TWO
FIELD_THREE

if i press replace all (or repeatedly press replace)

@guy038
i think you ment:
REPLACE \1\x5F\2 instead of REPLACE \1\x20\2