RegEx Expression to count a WORD in LINES

Elijah 5801

If I have 1000 lines of text, and a word MILKis found 1100 times in total, but the word MILK is not in all lines, because it is found several times in other lines.

Is there a RegEx Expression to count the amount of lines in which the word MILK appears?

Scott Sumner

@Elijah-5801

Sure, try: (?-s)^.*?MILK.*?\R

Press the Count button.

Make sure the last line has a line-ending on it if your word appears on that line and you want it counted. Sure would be nice to have a native option to ALWAYS put a line-ending on that last line!

guy038

Hi, @elija-5801 and All,

Very easy to achieve, indeed ! Let’s suppose we have the following text and you would like to search for the word test :

This is a test, a good test but a simple test

test

A simple line
The test to test
A test to do
test
Simple test which have not
been tested, yet

test test test
To determine
The number of lines
test

First, open a new tab ( Ctrl + N ) ( Leave the last line test without any line break )
Copy / paste, the text. Then,
Open the Find dialog ( Ctrl + F )
Select the Regular expression search mode
Type in the regex (?-s).*\btest\b, in order to know how many lines contain the word test, in the current file

OR

Type in the regex \btest\b, in order to know the number of occurrences of the word test, in the current file
Click on the Count button

=> The result appears, at the bottom of the Find dialog

Et voilà !

guy038

P.S. :

Note that if we have searched for the string test, even glued in words, with the regexes :

SEARCH (?-s).*test

SEARCH test

We would have obtained one more line and one more occurrence, because of the line “been tested, yet” !

See also my reply to your recent post :

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/community/topic/15390/regex-expression-help-with-keeping-text-and-replacing-formating-codes-only/4

Elijah 5801

I’m so appreciate this forum, the pros have solved two RegEx problems for me this weekend.

Thanks to Scott and Guy038.

Interestingly both your methods works perfectly.