How to search for words that do **not contain** the character: '

Thomas-Olivier

How to search for words that do not contain the character: ’
e.g. white, black?

accord’s
black
D’Arcy
I’ll
white

astrosofista

Assuming a straight single quote ' instead of a curly one, here is a way to get what you want:

Mark: \b(?<!')\w+(?!')\b

Put the caret at the very beginning of the document, select just the Regular Expression mode and click on Mark All.

Hope this helps.

guy038

Hello, @thomas-olivier, @astrosofista and All,

@astrosofista, my understanding is slightly different :

To get entire line, containing words characters only, use the regex ^\w+$
To get entire line, not containing the ' nor the ’ characters, use the regex ^[^'’\r\n]+$

Test these two regexes against the text below :

accord’s
"Program"
black
D’Arcy
and/or
I’ll
royalty_free
machine-readable
white
**** NOTEPAD++ LICENSE TERMS ****
Test

Best Regards,

guy038

Thomas-Olivier

Thank you, all 3 work.

astrosofista

@guy038, All:

I usually try to understand OP’s messages as literally as possible, unless it is very obvious that there is some mistake, such as the single quotation mark. In this case I read words and thought they were single words, unconnected to each other, but not necessarily on separate lines. Hence the regular expression I posted.

Nor did it cross my mind that there could be hyphenated compound words, since the posted sample did not include them.

However, the scenario that you propose is entirely possible and in fact your two regular expressions are simpler than mine. If I were OP, I would choose one of them.

Have a nice weekend