REGEX - Select only this part from text

Vasile Caraus

hello. I want to match only this part from text:

word
word
this_part
this_part
this_part
this_part
word
word

Any idea?

John Doge

Hi, it’s not entirely clear what the actual data is, but (this_part\r?\n)+ works on your example.

Vasile Caraus

thanks John, works. But, in the case I have this:

word
word
this_part_1
this_part_2
this_part_3
this_part_4
word
word

John Doge

If actual numbers are expected it’s (this_part_\d+\r?\n)+
For this_part followed by anything it’s (this_part.*\r?\n)+ with “. matches newline” switched off.

Vasile Caraus

:) ok, but “this_part” can be “bla bla”. Anyway, if I have this case, what will be the regex?

1.this is you
2.Home alone
3.My name is Prince.
4.Mom goes home.
5.I make cookies.
6.Love is my name.
7.sincerity and weekness
8.word and emotions

PeterJones

Your requirements appear to keep changing, from our perspective. You know exactly what you mean, but you keep describing it in different ways, which produce very different answers.

Here is my current interpretation of your requirements. For a file with arbitrary "blah"s that you want to ignore, using an arbitrary phrase “START” as the first line of the match and “FINISH” as the last line of the match (inclusive), having arbitrary data like:

blah
halb
START
some more here
FINISH
o-bla-dee
o-bla-dah

I was able to make that work as

Find what : .*(START.*FINISH).*
Replace with : $1
☑ Regular Expression ☑ . matches newline
Click [ Replace All ]

Given the input file above, my output file looked like

START
some more here
FINISH

But this is all just a guess as to what you want. If you really want something more like “everything between each START and FINISH, inclusive, no matter how many times START and FINISH occur”, I know it can be done… but my regex-foo isn’t strong enough. Ask @guy038, who is a regex guru extraordinaire.

blah
blady
START
some more here
FINISH
bladeee
blah
START
again with the keeping
FINISH
again with the ignoring

A hint when asking questions: if you don’t want people to interpret your example data literally – especially when asking for help with regular expressions – you need to plainly indicate it’s not literal, and you need to explain what can and cannot be in your non-literal data. Starting with asking for “this_part” for every line of the example data, then only tweaking your requirement to “this_part_#” strongly implied that your data-to-include all followed a very simple pattern.

You should probably also answer some other questions: do you want to ignore leading and/or trailing space on the START and FINISH matching lines (should both START and ____START____ match, assuming space ’ ', not underline ‘_’?); is your phrase partial (ie, should both “FINISH” and “FINISH NOW” match – and should the “NOW” be part of the match, or should it be discarded)? Give as many details about what should and should not match as you can.

Vasile Caraus

Peter, looks GREAT ! Your first solution is very good !

Guy38 already write the second solution on one of my first posts.

THANK YOU Both !