How to delete text after a specific character in each row

Rana Jawad

how to delete text after | in each row ( i just showed 3 rows for example )
string1 | string2
string4001 | string2668
string201 | string202

Scott Sumner

@Rana-Jawad

Do a regular expression replacement:

Find-what box: ^([^|]+\|).+
Replace-with box: \1
Search mode: ☑ Regular expression -AND- ☐ . matches newline

After doing this to your data, it results in:

string1 |
string4001 |
string201 |

The ^ in the regular expression anchors the search to the start of each line. Next one or more non-| characters are matched followed by a |. The characters on the line up to this point are remembered as group #1 by the enclosing parentheses. After this any number of characters is matched out to the end of the line. At replace time, the contents of group #1 remembered before are substituted for the entire line.

There are a lot of ways to do this with regular expressions. This is just one way.

guy038

Hello, @Rana-jawad,

An equivalent regex to the Scott’s one would be :

SEARCH (?-s)(?<=\|).*

REPLACE Leave EMPTY !

Notes :

The first part (?-s) is a modifier, which forces the regex engine to interpret the dot regex character as standing for any single standard character ( not End of Line characters )
The last part .* tries to match any range, even empty, of standard characters
The middle part (?<=\|) is a positive look-behind, that is to say a condition which must be true for an overall match
This condition implies that the matched range of characters must be preceded by a literal vertical bar ( | ), which have to be escaped with an \, because the | character is the regex symbol for alternation
And, due to the empty replacement box, this range of characters, located after the | character, is simply deleted

However, just note that, with my regex or Scott regex, if some of your lines contains several | characters, any text after the first | character, will be deleted. For instance, the text, below :

string1 | string2 | string3
string4001 | string2668 | string1234
string201 | string202 | string203

would be changed into this one :

string1 |
string4001 |
string201 |

Best Regards,

guy038