Delete text up to a certain number of characters from the end of a line

Keith Wood

I’ve tried a few different regex strings, but can’t figure out the lookahead part to make this work. I have a few thousand lines of text and am trying to remove the variable number of characters and leave a fixed number of them from the end of the line. Examples:

Input:

alhsoidoli aoisudoifu oaisoi
iodaoiu a;osidh ;oaiyu ;oisdlhidadsli
LOIHYoihdlhi OIHlohi LOHIOOLhiol oo

Output:

ifu oaisoi
dlhidadsli
OOLhiol oo

So the find criteria would match the last 10 characters from the end and preserve that, deleting the entire rest of the line. I don’t have any special delimiting character I can match on; every line is very different. The only thing I do know is the fixed number of characters from the end of the line. Thanks!

PeterJones

@Keith-Wood,

My logic would be “capture from the beginning of the line, as many characters as possible, until a lookahead of 10 characters before the EOL is matched”. That translates into something like:

FIND = ^.*(?=.{10}$)
REPLACE = empty
MODE = regular expression

Which worked for me

ifu oaisoi
dlhidadsli
OOLhiol oo

If this doesn’t work for you, you will have to clarify, after reading and taking to heart the following advice:

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Keith Wood

That worked like a champ! Thank you ever so much!