Regex for Searching <HEAD> Section

aksarben · Nov 1, 2019, 5:35 PM

I want to use Notepad++ to find soft hyphen characters (ISO 8859: 0xAD, Unicode U+00AD SOFT HYPHEN, HTML: ) in the <head> section of my HTML files. I tried the two regular expressions below, but both return zero hits.

<head>.*?.*?</head>
<head>.*.*</head>

Curiously, the following regex does finds soft hyphens in <figcaption> sections:

<figcaption>.*?.*?</figcaption>

I suspect the issue is that the <head> section contains newlines. I tried the search with the “. matches newline” both checked and unchecked. Still got zero hits both ways.

Is there a way to do this kind of search in Notepad++?

Alan Kilborn · Nov 1, 2019, 5:44 PM

@aksarben

I think the code blocks you used above are hiding your soft-hyphen character, at least visually. I find that if I copy and paste them into Notepad++, the soft-hyphen character reappears.

Anyway, I would try searching for: (?s)<head>.*?\x{00AD}.*?</head>

I think there have been some recent postings about Unicode characters used explicitly in the Find-what box of the Find dialog not working correctly…?

guy038 · Nov 1, 2019, 8:01 PM

Hello, @aksarben, @alan-kilborn and All,

Simply, use this regex S/R :

SEARCH (?s)(.*?<head>|\G)((?!</head>).)*?\K\xAD

REPLACE Any SINGLE character or STRING

Notes :

I assume, of course, that there only one section <head>........</head> per file
The <head>........</head> section can be, either, in one line or splitted into several ones
Any soft hyphen, found, above the starting tag <head> is ignored
Any soft hyphen, between the starting and the ending tag is found, individually
Any soft hyphen, found, under the ending tag </head> is ignored
Preferably, when testing on a single file, tick the wrap around option, which forces to starts the S/R process from the very beginning of the file

Best Regards,

guy038