I'm in a Paragraph Find and Replace Hell

Offshore9521

Fellow Notepad++ Users,

Could you please help me the the following search-and-replace problem I am having?

Im trying to turn the following text into the text mentioned after that. But instead of turning the 5 line text (first one) into the 3 line text (second one), it turns it into a 2 line text.

Here is the data I currently have (“before” data):

‘Colt?’
He turns to face her, and clears his throat.
Guilty sign. Very guilty. Probably has a guilty look on his face, but you
can’t tell, because he’s still wearing that helmet so you can’t see his
eyes.

Here is how I would like that data to look (“after” data):

‘Colt?’
He turns to face her, and clears his throat.
Guilty sign. Very guilty. Probably has a guilty look on his face, but you can’t tell, because he’s still wearing that helmet so you can’t see his eyes.

The “2 line text”:

‘Colt?’ He turns to face her, and clears his throat.
Guilty sign. Very guilty. Probably has a guilty look on his face, but you can’t tell, because he’s still wearing that helmet so you can’t see his eyes.

To accomplish this, I have tried using the following Find/Replace expressions and settings

Find What = (?<![\.\!\?])\r\n([a-z])
Replace With = \1
Search Mode = REGULAR EXPRESSION
Dot Matches Newline = NOT CHECKED

Unfortunately, this did not produce the output I desired, and I’m not sure why. Could you please help me understand what went wrong and help me find the solution?

guy038

Hello @offshore9521 and All,

Humm…, @offshore9521, there are two separate problems with your regex !

From your INPUT text :

‘Colt?’
He turns to face her, and clears his throat.
Guilty sign. Very guilty. Probably has a guilty look on his face, but you
can’t tell, because he’s still wearing that helmet so you can’t see his
eyes.

Your regex (?<![\.\!\?])\r\n([a-z]) means :

If a \r\n sequence, followed with a letter (a through z), is not preceded by :
- A dot
- An exclamation mark
- An interrogation mark
Then rewrite this letter

BTW, you can shorter this regex as (?<![.!?])\r\n([a-z])

But, the ’ character is not a character of the [.!?] list. Thus, this explains why your regex merges the lines 1 and 2

Now, I suppose that your true goal was : if a line is not a true sentence, then merge that line with the next one with a space character ? This lead to the following regex S/R :

FIND (?<![.!?’])\r\n(?=\w)

REPLACE \x20

So, any \r\n sequence, which respects the before and after conditions, is simply replaced with a space character

Notes :

As you see, I included the ’ character within the list of the forbidden chars, in the negative look-behind
I used \w, which is identical to the [\u\l\d_] class character, instead of [a-z] to not bother about case !

Remark :

Instead of \r\n, I could have used the \R syntax with matches any kind of line endings ( \r, \n or \r\n ), but, because it is preceded by a negative look-behind, we must insert \r and \n as forbidden characters, as well !

FIND (?<![.!?’\r\n])\R(?=\w)

REPLACE \x20

Best Regards,

guy038

P.S. : As an exercice, try to understand why the following regex S/R does not work as expected :

FIND (?<![.!?’])\R(?=\w)

REPLACE \x20

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