Hello Robert and Janet,
Seemingly, as you seem comfortable with regular expressions, you could easily extract the matched strings with a simple regex ?
For instance, let’s suppose the simple list of people of an enterprise, below :
Occupation Age Title Name Forename
---------------------------------------------
Technician 50 Mr SMITH John
Secretary 25 Miss BROWN Amy
Manager 40 Mrs HARPER Edith
....... .. ... ...... .....
and that you would like to do some statistics, depending on the age and/or the title of these persons. Then, you would need, ( may be for confidentiality ! ) to extract, ONLY, the second and third columns of that list. If so :
Copy this list in an new tab of N++
Perform the S/R, below, in Regular expression search mode :
SEARCH .*?(\d+ +\w+).*
REPLACE \1
If, in addition, you would prefer to delete any line, that does NOT match the regex, use, instead the S/R below :
SEARCH .*?(\d+ +\w+).*|^.*\R
REPLACE \1
You’ll only get the strings matched by the regex, below :
50 Mr
25 Miss
40 Mrs
Note :
If the regex can’t be found, the first part of the alternative is not matched ( so, the group \1 doesn’t exist ) but the second part of the alternative is, obviously, always matched, as it matches an entire line, with its EOL character(s)
Best Regards,
guy038
