Marked text manipulation

Suncatcher

@guy038 well, RegExp approach is not bad but seems to be disposable. I tried to adapt it to another pattern and that’s what I’ve got.
I set the pattern which consists of dot and two digits.

And rewrote your expressions accordingly - (?-s)(?!.*\.\d{2}\.).+|(\.\d{2}\.)|(.)
And that’s what it output to me

And that is obviously not the thing supposed to be there. To achieve our aim regexp should be rewritten every time. Pythonscript seems to be more universal and consistent approach.

guy038

Hi, Suncatcher and Scott,

Ah… Of course, my previous regex was much to closed to, your specific regex \d{3}\. . In addition, I tried, hard, from what you said, to keep the exact position where the different matches were !

So, I decided to run the Scott script to see how this script re-writes the different matches :-) BTW, Scott, very nice script for people, who does not worry about regex problems or details ;-))

So, starting from my original example text, below :

134.170.110.48
85.33.98.0 - 85.33.99.255
185.33.220.38
200.25.6.78
65.55.52.23
5.155.52.23
12.3.8.145
185.33.220.0 - 185.33.223.255
1.23.137.2
1.2.3.4
25.155.52.153
67.42.95.0 - 67.42.95.99
31.53.61.99 - 31.53.61.100
58.33.99.0 - 58.33.101.1

The Scott’s script, put the following text, in the clipboard, in that form :

.17
.11
.48
.33.98
.33.99.25
.33.22
.38
.25
.78
.55.52.23
.15
.52.23
.14
.33.22
.33.22
.25
.23.13
.15
.52.15
.42.95
.42.95.99
.53.61.99
.53.61.10
.33.99
.33.10

From this modified text, we are able to deduce that the script follows TWO main rules :

If two or more matches are adjacent, there are rewritten as a single unit, in a same line
As soon as two consecutive matches, are NON adjacent, there are displayed in two consecutive lines

Quite different than before, isn’t it ?!

I, then, realized that you can start, with my general regex S/R , exposed in my THIRD post, on that topic, which is :

SEARCH (?s)^.*?(Your regex to match)|(?s).*\z

REPLACE (?1\1\r\n)

With a minor modification, this new general S/R, below, will adopt the same output displaying, than the Scott’s script :-))

SEARCH (?s)^.*?((?:Your regex to match)+)|(?s).*\z ( GENERAL regex syntax )

REPLACE (?1\1\r\n)

So, if we use your second regex \.\d{2}, that we insert in the general regex syntax, above, we obtain the practical S/R:

SEARCH (?s)^.*?((?:\.\d{2})+)|(?s).*\z

REPLACE (?1\1\r\n)

which gives, after replacement, the expected output text, identical to Scott’s script one !

NOTES :

Compared to my THIRD post, the second part, of this new general regex, has changed into : ((?:Your regex to match)+) :
- It represents any consecutive and adjacent matches of your regex, which is stored as group 1 and output on a single line, followed by a line break
- The inner parentheses , (?:Your regex to match) , stands for a non-capturing group, containing a single match of your regex
The IMPORTANT and P.S. sections, of my THIRD post, are still pertinent

Best Regards,

guy038

P.S. :

I did an other tests, with your first regex \d{3}\. and, also, with the simple regex \d\.\d, leading to the appropriate following S/R :

SEARCH (?s)^.*?((?:\d\.\d)+)|(?s).*\z

REPLACE (?1\1\r\n)

After replacement, the resulting text is, as expected :

4.1
0.1
0.4
5.33.98.0
5.33.99.2
5.33.2
0.3
0.25.6
5.55.52.2
5.1
5.52.2
2.3
8.1
5.33.2
0.0
5.33.2
3.2
1.23.1
7.2
1.2
3.4
5.1
5.52.1
7.42.95.0
7.42.95.9
1.53.61.9
1.53.61.1
8.33.99.0
8.33.1
1.1

and corresponds, exactly, to the text, generated by the Scott’s script :-))

Scott Sumner

So I’m currently trying to copy some multi-line (red)marked text out of a large (~70MB) file, and my Pythonscript technique for doing so (see earlier posting in this thread) works but is super-slow on a large file; it iterates through the file one position at a time (pos += 1). Is there a faster way to code it, given the functions we have at our disposal for doing this? @Claudia-Frank , ideas? :-)

dail

@Scott-Sumner

See next post, this is wrong!

AFAIK using indicatorStart() and indicatorEnd() is quite efficient finding marked locations. The code you posted above doesn’t seem to be utilizing this as efficiently as it could. I have no way of testing this following code but you should be able to do something like this:

start = 0
end = 0
while True:
	start = editor.indicatorStart(SCE_UNIVERSAL_FOUND_STYLE, end)
	if start == 0:
		break
	end = editor.indicatorEnd(SCE_UNIVERSAL_FOUND_STYLE, start)
	accum_text += editor.getTextRange(start, end) + '\r\n'

~~Again this hasn’t been tested so there may be corner cases you need to check for…such as using start + 1 when calling indicatorEnd() but this is the gist of it.~~

dail

@Scott-Sumner

Woops sorry about the above, it was way off. Here is a small LuaScript which works (I’m sure you can easily translate it into Python)

SCE_UNIVERSAL_FOUND_STYLE = 31
start = editor:IndicatorEnd(SCE_UNIVERSAL_FOUND_STYLE, -1)
while start ~= 0 and start ~= editor.Length do
	endd = editor:IndicatorEnd(SCE_UNIVERSAL_FOUND_STYLE, start)
	print(editor:textrange(start, endd))
	start = editor:IndicatorEnd(SCE_UNIVERSAL_FOUND_STYLE, endd)
end

Note: The one major initial bug I know if is that it is incorrect if the very first character of the file is marked.

Claudia Frank

@dail, @Scott-Sumner

This is strange, isn’t it? You have to use IndicatorEnd to find the start position but it is like it is…

Cheers
Claudia

dail

@Claudia-Frank

Yeah I ran into this as well when modifying my DoxyIt plugin…the way I came to think of it now is that it finds the end of the range you specify by pos. And technically a range that is not marked has an end…which is the start of the range you want…oh well :)

Claudia Frank

@dail

yeah, :-) sounds … logical … some how . … still confusing :-)
And what makes it confusing even more, what you already said, is, that if you do
editor.indicatorEnd(SCE_UNIVERSAL_FOUND_STYLE, -1) you will get the end position.
Aahhhh :-D

What I meant is about

Note: The one major initial bug I know if is that it is incorrect if the very first character of the file is marked.

Cheers
Claudia

Scott Sumner

@dail , @Claudia-Frank :

Thanks for your inputs, I used the basic ideas but came up with my own Pythonscript version that is much faster than my original PS version on large files, and seems to correctly handle the oddities of the editor.indicatorEnd() function previously mentioned.

So here is RedmarkedTextToClipboard2.py:

def RTTC2__main():

    SCE_UNIVERSAL_FOUND_STYLE = 31  # N++ red-"mark" feature highlighting style indicator number
    ind_end_ret_vals_list = []
    ierv = 0
    while True:
        ierv = editor.indicatorEnd(SCE_UNIVERSAL_FOUND_STYLE, ierv)
        # editor.indicatorEnd() returns 0 if no redmarked text exists
        # editor.indicatorEnd() returns last pos in file if no more redmarked text beyond the 'ierv' argument value
        if ierv == 0 or len(ind_end_ret_vals_list) > 0 and ierv == ind_end_ret_vals_list[-1]: break
        ind_end_ret_vals_list.append(ierv)
    if len(ind_end_ret_vals_list) > 0:
        if editor.indicatorValueAt(SCE_UNIVERSAL_FOUND_STYLE, 0) == 1:
            # compensate for weirdness with editor.indicatorEnd() when a match starts at the zero position
            zero = 0; ind_end_ret_vals_list.insert(0, zero)  # insert at BEGINNING of list
        if editor.indicatorValueAt(SCE_UNIVERSAL_FOUND_STYLE, ind_end_ret_vals_list[-1]) == 0:
            # remove end-of-file position unless it is part of the match
            ind_end_ret_vals_list.pop()
    start_end_pos_tup_list = zip(*[iter(ind_end_ret_vals_list)]*2)  # see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14902686/turn-flat-list-into-two-tuples
    accum_text = ''
    for (start_pos, end_pos) in start_end_pos_tup_list:
        accum_text += editor.getTextRange(start_pos, end_pos) + '\r\n'
    if len(accum_text) > 0: editor.copyText(accum_text)  # put results in clipboard

RTTC2__main()

Claudia Frank

@Scott-Sumner

Hi Scott,
a nice one - good performance improvement. :-)

If you are still looking for performance increase,
a general suggestion would be to use as less global objects as possible within a loop as
the cost of loading global is expensive.
Cache global objects at the beginning of the script.
Creating the tuple list from the beginning should be faster than creating from a flat list.
Meaning do your two indicatorEnd calls and create a tuple from the results which than
gets added to a list.
Maybe a list comprehension to create the accum_text is faster as well - but not really sure
as it would need to call the global object.
All in all I assume this might make it faster up to 3-5%, not sure if it is worth thinking about it.

Cheers
Claudia

Scott Sumner

@Claudia-Frank

not sure if it is worth thinking about it.

I should have posted my before-and-after timing, but really, the “before” was “forever” on my 70MB data file! The “after” was extremely quick, certainly on par with how long it took Notepad++'s Mark feature to redmark my desired text. Therefore performance was rated “very acceptable” for the new version. And that’s really all the performance I care about, so further optimizations aren’t worth it to me. Probably some of those optimizations you suggest would make the code less readable, too, so I’m definitely not wanting to go there (although now I leave myself open to comments on how readable/unreadable the existing code is). :-D

I probably would have written this better the first time around if how these “indicator” functions worked was better documented!

Until Notepad++ natively allows a non-destructive (@guy038’s regex method is destructive…but there is UNDO…hmmm) copy of all regex-matched text, this little script will serve me nicely, now on all files big and small.

Maria Doll

I have read almost all post but i did not know exactly, what was the problem … however i am continue read this forum and know the new things …[Dissertation Proposal Writing Service](LINK REMOVED)

Kashif Rana

@Scott-Sumner

I am in the same situation but regular expression method is not working for me to copy match text.

I want to grab all occurrences in configuration file where first line starts from ‘object’ and immediately second line starts with ‘nat’

object network obj_any
nat (inside,outside) dynamic interface
object network obj-test
nat (DMZ1,outside) static 10.206.49.180
object network obj-192.168.236.200
nat (DMZ1,outside) static 10.206.74.60
object network obj-192.168.236.8
nat (DMZ1,outside) static 10.206.49.183 tcp 8080 80
object network obj-192.168.236.9
nat (DMZ1,outside) static 10.206.49.178 tcp 1002 22
object network obj-192.168.236.10
nat (DMZ1,outside) static 10.206.49.178 tcp 8080 80
object network obj-192.168.236.13
nat (DMZ1,outside) static 10.206.74.58 dns

I wrote regular expression ^object.\R\snat.* to grab both lines
starting with ‘object’ and with ‘nat’ but when I am replacing it with
(?1\1), it is deleting the matched lines. Any dea what could be the correct replace string to keep only matced two lines

Scott Sumner

@Kashif-Rana :

Not sure exactly what you are asking but on your data this seems to work to match it:

Find-what zone: (?-s)^object.*\Rnat.*

But what’s this about replacement? This thread is just talking about matching text, redmarking it, and copying it…so I’m confused about what you want to do…

Kashif Rana

@Scott-Sumner sorry for the confusion. What I want, whatever my regular expression matches, it is two line match (first line starts with ‘object’ and second line starts with ‘nat’). So like my regular expression will catch 100 instances of two lines below in huge file with other data as well and I want to copy that multi-line match.

object network obj-192.168.236.13
nat (DMZ1,outside) static 10.206.74.58 dns

‘mark’ is marking all lines but ‘bookmark’ is only bookmarking first line, not second line so I cannot copy through bookmark.

So question is how to copy all instances of multi-line match by regular expression?

Scott Sumner

@Kashif-Rana

Have you actually read this thread from top to bottom? If so, have you tried setting up and using RedmarkedTextToClipboard2.py above? If I’m understanding your need correctly (still have my doubts) it seems as if that would solve the problem…

Kashif Rana

@Scott-Sumner I will try this script. But without script, is it possible to copy multiple instances of matched result (that is multi-line) by regex in a text file?

Scott Sumner

@Kashif-Rana

Ummmm, well…No…that’s why the script was developed in the first place…seems like this should be obvious from the earlier postings in this thread…

Andriy Poznakhovskyy

Hey all,

I know this topic is quite old, anyway decided to share solution I’ve discovered (I’m not so technical, so Python script isn’t the option for me). So, long story short, I’ve extracted a long JSON response and needed to copy 95 URLs from it only and ignore everything else. Like in @Suncatcher’s case, everything was stored in a single line.

So, I did the following:

Search for https://site.com/project/(.*?) regexp and replace all matches with \r\nhttps://site.com/project/$1\r\n so URLs were moved to separate lines;
Afterward, switch to “Mark” tool, check “Bookmark line” option and mark all https://site.com/project/(.*?)
Finally, click “Search” menu => Bookmark => Remove unmarked lines

That’s it, list of necessary items only (URLs in my case) was created 🎉 My case is easier comparing to topic’s author, anyway hope this will be helpful for someone in the future, cheers!

P.S. @guy038 thanks for mentioning Bookmark feature, I’ve never used it before and it’s super helpful

Alan Kilborn

More old thread revival…

So I recently had a need for what is discussed in this thread, but I needed it embedded in a Pythonscript, and all I really needed was the logic conveyed by @guy038 with this solution:

So I figured out the Your regex to match part for my data; I’ll use Bob|Ted here for that for purposes of illustration, and of course some sample data:

Alice Carol Alan Bob Ted
Ted Bob
Bob Carol Ted
Ted Carol
Alice Carol
Alice Bob
Bob
Alan Carol
Alan Alice
Bob Carol Alan
Alice
Bob Ted Alan
Alice Ted
Alan Ted
Ted Alan Alice Carol
Bob Ted Alice Carol
Bob Alan Alice Carol
Alan
Bob Ted Alan Carol
Ted
Alan Bob
Alice Carol Ted
Alice Bob Alan
Alice Bob Carol
Bob Carol
Bob Ted Alan Alice
Alice Ted Alan
Carol
Alice Carol Alan
Alice Bob Ted
Carol Ted Alan

and I coded up the Pythonscript one-liner for it based on @guy038 's regex:

editor.rereplace(r'(?s)^.*?(Bob|Ted)|(?s).*\z', r'(?1\1\r\n)')

and I thought I would end up with a number of lines with either Bob or Ted on them. What actually happened was that I ended up with a single-line result of Alice! Clearly, INCORRECT! Or at least not what I needed.

Digging in and working on it a bit, I found a correct way to achieve it in a Pythonscript replacement, and that is:

editor.rereplace(r'(?s)(Bob|Ted)|(?:.+?(?=(?1)))|(?:.+\z)', r'?1\1\r\n')

which, for the sample data above, yields the expected:

Bob
Ted
Ted
Bob
Bob
Ted
Ted
Bob
Bob
Bob
Bob
Ted
Ted
Ted
Ted
Bob
Ted
Bob
Bob
Ted
Ted
Bob
Ted
Bob
Bob
Bob
Bob
Ted
Ted
Bob
Ted
Ted

So, long story LONG, but I wanted to share that if anyone tries this technique using a script, the search regex to use might need to be altered to:

SEARCH (?s)( Your regex to match)|(?:.+?(?=(?1)))|(?:.+\z)

The REPLACE part is unchanged from what @guy038 provided.

Note that I also tested it interactively in Notepad++'s Replace window and it works fine there as well, at least for my sample data.