How to change timestamp to hh:mm:ss.mss format

Elijah Alcarde

Hi I have lines in a document that has this format: Thh:mm:ssZ

I need to change it to Thh:mm:ss.mssZ

How do I search/replace in this format using regex? Thank you.

Alan Kilborn

Are you just going to invent data for the missing mss ? Or do you simply want it to be always 000?

Elijah Alcarde

Hi Alan, I just want it to be 000Z

PeterJones

@Elijah-Alcarde ,

Then assuming it’s always two digits for every hour, minute, and second element,

find = T(\d\d:\d\d:\d\d)Z
replace = T${1}.000Z
search mode = regular expression

should work for you.

If some of the hours are only single-digit hours, (ie, don’t have the leading zero),

find = T(\d{1,2}:\d\d:\d\d)Z

Elijah Alcarde

@PeterJones Thank you so much it worked!

It would be much appreciated if you explain a little bit how you did the replace :)

PeterJones

For further info, see my boilerplate below.

For specifics of this, I’ll give a brief description:

The T and Z are literals, in both the search and replace expressions. The (...) makes a group#1 which contains whatever matches inside. \d matches any digit (0-9, and some other unicode “digit” characters from other languages). \d\d thus matches two consecutive digits; \d{1,2} matches 1 or 2 digits. : matches the literal :. Thus, T(\d\d:\d\d:\d\d)Z matches the hh:mm:ss in between a T and a Z, and stores it in group#1. For the replace, ${1} is the contents of group#1, and everything else is a literal so, “replace it with a T, followed by the contents of group#1 from the find-match, followed by .000 and finally a Z”.

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