Sorry, I need to revise slightly my previous answer. If you follow that solution you will finish with 2 lines combined. I’ve actually considered a slightly better answer.

Find: (\R)\R+
Replace: \1

What this does is find the first CR/LF (you may need to replace \R with the correct CR/LF character your file has). Then there has to be 1 or more additional CR/LF characters. We only keep the first CR/LF character, removing all others. This will cater for situation of multiple empty lines together, as \R+ greedily consumes as many CR/LF characters as possible.

I have to ask the question though, is the line truly empty or does it have 1 or more spaces in it? Spaces will require a different expression. If spaces then:
Find: (\R)\h*\R+
Replace: \1
The caveat here is that \h refers to both a horizontal space, a tab and a line feed. Depending on the character set used a \h might also refer to part of your CR/LF. If so then replacing \h with \s might fix it.

Terry

Thank you very much! This is an adequate solution.

Solved, please disregard

My bad - I failed to copy over the global.xml file :-/

Hello, @pratap-chava and All,

Regarding your needs, I think that a suitable regex S/R could be :

SEARCH : (?s-i)^File created by.+?\RMessage log.+?$\R

REPLACE Leave Empty

Don’t forget to select the Regular expresion search mode and to tick the Wrap-around option

Notes :

At beginning of the regex, the modifiers (?s-i) mean that :

The . dot regex character will match any single character ( Standard and EOL chars )

The search is performed in a sensitive way. If you prefer insensitive matches just change that part with (?si) !

Then the part File created by.+?\RMessage log looks, from beginning ( ^ ) of line, for any text, beginning with File created by and ending at the first expression Message log, preceded by a line-break ( \R )

Now, the final part .*?$\R tries to match a range of any character, ending at the nearest end of line ( $ ), and followed with a line-break ( \R )

And, due to the empty replacement zone, all that block of text is, then, simply deleted !

Cheers,

guy038

@Matt-McDowall

Suggestion: Consider the TakeNotes plugin.

@Mikhail-V Who thanks that was the Issue
@PeterJones You also thanks for your help…

There’s also a plugin for Notepad++ called MathPad, which can be installed via the Plugin Manager, with more info at it’s homepage. I don’t know whether it will meet your needs, but it’s something to look into.

Here is me helping you write the script: study the VBScript and/or PowerShell script at the SuperUser question you linked. Tweak it, and see how those changes affect the results. Experiment until it no longer requires the quote marks. Continue experimenting until it does everything you want it to. If you have shown some effort, but still cannot get it to work, ask a question in an appropriate forum, where the topic is about the scripting language you are using (SuperUser/StackOverflow might be a good location).

Some here would be able to use the PythonScript plugin to automate those calculations inside Notepad++. Others might suggest skipping the middle-man: if you have a file with 14000 instances, it might be simpler to run it through an offline script, which could be written in VBA, Python, Lua, Perl, or your favorite scripting language. But it might take a few hours to write something: and that brings me to my last point:

But if by “help me to write a script” you mean, “write a script for me”, then you’ve come to the wrong place. It sounds like you’re asking for custom coding services, which will likely cost you something. Good luck in presenting the question, as framed (ie, without showing any effort of your own), in any coding forum and getting the exact script you want.

@Brian-Phillips,

As it says on the File System Redirector page that ++@Scott-Sumner linked, “32-bit applications can access the native system directory by substituting %windir%\Sysnative”, so if you are using 32-bit Notepad++, and want to edit a file in the OS’s 64-bit system32\Drivers directory, you can browse to %windir%\Sysnative\Drivers or c:\windows\sysnative\Drivers (you can paste that in the File name box, or in the path-box at the top, if you’ve got that displayed), and it will be the files you expected.

@Henry-Vistbacka

As @Mikhail-V suggests, you could do such a thing if you are willing to install and use the PythonScript plugin. Maybe there are other ways as well, but all would involve installing something extra, so why not the PS plugin? :-)

Here’s some quick sample PS code, modify/experiment/enhance as you like:

search_text = '--' replacement_text = 'en-dash' # <----- this is just placeholder, put what you want here def callback_sci_CHARADDED(args): if chr(args['ch']) == search_text[-1]: cp = editor.getCurrentPos() search_text_length = len(search_text) start_of_search_text_pos = cp - search_text_length if editor.getTextRange(start_of_search_text_pos, cp) == search_text: editor.beginUndoAction() editor.deleteRange(start_of_search_text_pos, search_text_length) editor.insertText(start_of_search_text_pos, replacement_text) editor.endUndoAction() end_of_search_text_pos = start_of_search_text_pos + len(replacement_text) editor.setCurrentPos(end_of_search_text_pos) editor.setSelection(end_of_search_text_pos, end_of_search_text_pos) editor.chooseCaretX() editor.callback(callback_sci_CHARADDED, [SCINTILLANOTIFICATION.CHARADDED])

@Mikhail-V

I think the issue with “Enter” binding should be reported if it is not yet been.

Yes, sure, go ahead and report it if it isn’t already an issue.

I assigned it to Alt+F and luckily it works without invoking the menu

Okay, now that is odd…but nice for what you need at the moment!

…maybe strange…and adds overhead…for me it feels totally ok.

It is totally okay…any “overhead” is meaningless…plus you are ready when editor.lineDuplicate() doesn’t meet your needs in all cases…you already have a script file started…for your “enhancements”! :-D

Can’t believe I hadn’t tried that - Exactly what I need.

Thanks!