sort file removing duplicates possible?
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this should do it (the problem was in the removing of duplicates):
^(.?)$\s+?^(?=.^\1$) -
Your regular expression will not work as shown; I can tell some of the important characters in it are missing (due to being consumed by the Markdown syntax this website uses). If you need to write a * here, either escape it, like this: \* in which it will then appear like this: *…or put it inside backticks (also called grave accents), like this `*` in which case it will then appear like this:
*(I find this second way of doing it easier/cleaner).So let’s assume you meant to post
^(.*?)$\s+?^(?=.*^\1$)That is clearly wrong as it introduces the notion of whitespace (with the
\s+). That may work for exactly what YOU are doing, but in general; if we are sorting lines and then deleting duplicates then\sdoesn’t belong.I retested the original
test sort and del dupe linesmacro definition I posted earlier, and it (still) works. So let’s try an example, here’s some random unsorted data with some duplicates:nonprehensile aeriferous calabrian estimating urethrostomy redigging estimating crystalling cynwulf fetor kali armada auspicate tusser fetor zoophyte ribless fetor deducibly calabrian estimating expressivityAfter running the macro, we obtain the desired result (sorted, duplicates removed), nothing more, nothing less:
aeriferous armada auspicate calabrian crystalling cynwulf deducibly estimating expressivity fetor kali nonprehensile redigging ribless tusser urethrostomy zoophyteEarlier I presented the regular expression (in the macro) without explanation. Here’s what it is actually doing to find matches:
(?-s) ^ (.*) (?: \R ) (?s) (?= .* ^ \1 \R ) ^^^^^-----------------------------------------------------------------------------> after this . appearing will match any single character except a line-ending character ^-------------------------------------------------------------------------> match only at start of line ^ ^------------------------------------------------------------------> remember what matches the expression between `(` and `)`; call it "group #1" ^^-------------------------------------------------------------------> match zero or more characters (in this case it will stop matching at the next line-ending character) ^^^ ^---------------------------------------------------> the syntax `(?:` followed by something followed by `)` means to match what is inside but don't remember it ^^-------------------------------------------------------> match a line-ending ^^^^--------------------------------------------> after this a . appearing will match any single character including a line-ending character ^^^ ^---------------> the syntax `(?=` followed by something followed by `)` means whatever is inside needs to match for the overall expression to match, but it isn't consumed and isn't part of the match ^^---------------------------------> match zero or more characters (ANY characters, including line-ending characters...this will match across lines) ^-----------------------------> match at start of line ^^------------------------> match what we remembered earlier as "group #1" ^^-------------------> match a line-ending characterSo that’s actually still pretty technical/confusing. Maybe this is better:
- look at the complete contents of the current line
- glance further down (any arbitrary amount of distance) in the file to see if there is an exact duplicate of the current line contents; if so, the current line is a MATCH
- if there was a MATCH, do the REPLACEMENT (see below)
- move beyond the current line (go down one line)
- repeat these steps until the file is exhausted
When there is a MATCH, perform the specified REPLACEMENT on the matched text. Since the matched text is the entire current line (with line-ending), and the replacement is NOTHING, this effectively deletes the current line. This is what is desired because our goal is to removed duplicate lines and we’ve already established that the matched line occurs again further down in the file.
Dedicated regexers might catch that my regular expression is more-complicated than needed. The
(?:\R)part could be changed to simply\R.(?:)is normally used when some grouping without remembering is necessary. Here\Rneeds no grouping so the(?:)is just extra fluff…does no harm except making the whole expression harder to read.Super-dedicated regexers would also say that the regular expression is more-complicated than needed because at the point it is run (inside the macro above) the file is already sorted! Very true. The regular expression above works for sorted or unsorted duplicate line detection/removal. Here’s the simpler one that will only work on the sorted lines situation:
(?-s)^(.*)\R(?=^\1\R)One more thing worth mentioning is that if you want to delete duplicate lines but ignore/leave blank/(empty!) lines, simply change
(.*)in the regular expression to(.+). Instead of “match ZERO or more characters”, this change will “match ONE or more characters”, effectively failing to match truly empty lines so they won’t be removed. -
I had problem with a file today, I don’t know why,
is there any way I can send you the file to take a look? -
@patrickdrd said:
send you the file to take a look
Post its contents on http://textuploader.com/ and reply here with the link to it. Also indicate exactly what problem you are seeing if it isn’t obvious. No guarantees about how deeply I can get involved, but I’ll take a quick look… :-)
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ok, it’s here:
http://textuploader.com/d4dkrremoving duplicates results contain a duplicate result
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remove duplicates without sorting produces the result:
DBServerIP=10.1.249.215
DBServerIP=10.12.77.185
DBServerIP=10.1.249.215(1st and 3rd exact duplicates)
and sorting first and then removing dups results in:
DBServerIP=10.12.22.129
DBServerIP=10.12.77.185
DBServerIP=10.12.77.185last 2 duplicated
(using your regular expression in both cases of course)
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Okay, so a quick look told me what is happening. It’s interesting. :-)
If you run only the sort on this data, you’ll get this at the end of the file:
You’d think that the removal of duplicate lines after this would result in only a single occurrence of
DBServerIP=10.12.77.185. However, if we look closer at what is really left after the duplicate removal (turning on visibility of line-endings!), we see:
We see that the two lines with that IP address truly are different–one has a line-ending and one doesn’t–and because these two lines are not the same, the regular-expression replacement is working correctly by leaving both of these lines after it does its work.
All of the original lines that ended in
.185had line-endings (in other words, were exactly the same), so I’d say this is an artifact resulting from the sort operation (in my mind this is a sort BUG!).But we can work around it. There could be a regular expression solution, but maybe the regex that removes duplicates is complicated enough. What I’d suggest here is to modify the original macro, after the sort but before the find+replace, to:
- move caret position to the end of file (the sort operation leaves it at the beginning of file)
- insert a (Windows style) line-ending
- move caret position back to beginning of file (in preparation for the find+replace)
Thus:
<Macro name="test sort and del dupe lines 2" Ctrl="no" Alt="no" Shift="no" Key="0"> <Action type="2" message="0" wParam="42059" lParam="0" sParam="" /> <Action type="0" message="2318" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="" /> <Action type="1" message="2170" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="
" /> <Action type="1" message="2170" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="
" /> <Action type="0" message="2316" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="" /> <Action type="3" message="1700" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="" /> <Action type="3" message="1601" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="(?-s)^(.*)(?:\R)(?s)(?=.*^\1\R)" /> <Action type="3" message="1625" wParam="0" lParam="2" sParam="" /> <Action type="3" message="1602" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="" /> <Action type="3" message="1702" wParam="0" lParam="512" sParam="" /> <Action type="3" message="1701" wParam="0" lParam="1609" sParam="" /> </Macro>Compare that with the earlier version much earlier in this thread.
Running this new macro on your data results in:
which is the desired result.
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For the
DBServerIP=10.1.249.215case you mentioned, if you don’t do the sort first, then a.215line is the last line of the data you turn over to the regular expression replace operation. Thus it lacks the trailing line-ending that the earlier occurrence of a similar line has. Same issue as the.185case… -
thanks a ton!
I’d a like a more “generic” approach, so I called trim 42056 to clear empty lines first,
because sorting puts an empty line at the top if is finds one,
then going on as you suggested -
I’m glad you have a solution. Yeah, the empty line thing with sorting is rather bad, but the end-user can’t control this behavior of the sorting. I think I’ve changed my mind and it is probably best to alter the regular expression a bit in order to handle the situation where there is a duplicate-but-without-line-ending at the end of the file. So I’d suggest changing it to:
(?-s)^(.*)\R(?s)(?=.*^\1(?:\R|\z))I’ve done two things to this regex:
- I removed the
(?:and)around the first\R(a simplification discussed earlier so no need to say any more here) - The final
\Rwas changed to(?:\R|\z)(see discussion below)
The
\R|\zpart is what allows an almost-duplicate at the end-of-file-without-line-ending to be detected. The new part to this is the\zwhich roughly means “match only at the very end of the data”.The
(?:and)was added so that the|only affects the\Rthat precedes it and the\zthat follows it - I removed the
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Hello @patrickdrd, @scott-sumner and All,
Generally speaking, when you want to remove duplicate lines, from a
PREVIOUSLY SORTEDlist, just use this simple regex S/R, below :SEARCH
(?-s)(.*\R)\1+REPLACE
\1This regex is quite fast, because, in case of numerous duplicates, the part
\1+grabs all the duplicates ( with their EOL characters ), at once and just rewrites the first item of each block :-))IMPORTANT : the last item of your sorted list must be followed by EOL character(s) !
Cheers,
guy038
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after trying both the macro and the textfx solution for a long time,
I’ve seen that still ultraedit’s sorting works much better than both of them,
I first rejected the macro for textfx’s favor but I found out lately that neither the latter does a good job, at least I prefer the sorting done by ultraedit ,sorry,
I don’t have an example at the moment, I’ll post again when I do -
sorry, did not read the whole thread but what about a python one liner?
editor.setText('\r\n'.join(list(set(editor.getText().splitlines()))))Cheers
Claudia -
forgot sorting
editor.setText('\r\n'.join(sorted(list(set(editor.getText().splitlines())))))Cheers
Claudia -
thanks, I’m keeping that too and I’ll let you know
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ok, I tested, this doesn’t work either somehow, at least doesn’t work like ue’s one, i.e.
I tested with easylist from: https://easylist.to/easylist/easylist.txt (69883 lines),
ue’s function cuts it to: 69238npp results:
python scipt: 69818
macro (scott) is a bit slow and results in 19610 lines (!) and
textfx results in 69818 as wellguy038 regular expression results in 28109 lines,
according to my experience, I bet that ue’s result is the correct one,
at least to my taste -
could you, by any chance, upload the ue cutted list?
To see the differences.Cheers
Claudia -
yes, of course, please tell me where, pastebin doesn’t work, it’s blocked here (at work),
any other suggestions? -
actually pastebin is my first choice as well and haven’t used others for quite some time now.
Heard about
https://www.zippyshare.com/
https://www.sendspace.com/should be good and anonymous but haven’t tried it so far.
Cheers
Claudia -
Yea, I used to be a fan of regular expression replacement when doing this, but with “larger” datasets there always seems like there is so much tweaking and experimentation needed to get it right (for a particular dataset) that it is hardly worth it, unless you like playing with regular expressions all day instead of solving a particular problem and moving on quickly.
A Pythonscript solution such as @Claudia-Frank 's seems fine…
