Community
    • Login

    Remove last 5 characters from lines in text file?

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Help wanted · · · – – – · · ·
    4 Posts 3 Posters 3.5k Views
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as topic
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with topic management privileges can see it.
    • drghtyD
      drghty
      last edited by

      Hi everyone,

      I would like to get Notepad++ to remove the last 5 lines from a text file I have. I want to turn this

      10 Cloverfield Lane 2016
      12 Angry Men 1957

      into this

      10 Cloverfield Lane
      12 Angry Men

      I have Googled but I’m stuck. Thanks for any help.

      M Andre Z EckenrodeM 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • M Andre Z EckenrodeM
        M Andre Z Eckenrode @drghty
        last edited by

        @drghty said in Remove last 5 characters from lines in text file?:

        Hi everyone,
        I would like to get Notepad++ to remove the last 5 lines from a text file I have.

        Make sure caret is at start of file, or at or before first line you want to be affected, or enable Wrap around
        Search Mode = Regular expression

        FIND: .{5}$
        REPLACE: [empty]

        .{5} matches any five characters
        $ matches the end of the line

        Mark OlsonM 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • Mark OlsonM
          Mark Olson @M Andre Z Eckenrode
          last edited by

          @M-Andre-Z-Eckenrode
          Slightly off, because you need to make sure that . doesn’t match newline.
          Correct find/replace is
          FIND: (?-s).{5}$ ((?-s) turns OFF . matches newline)
          REPLACE: [empty]

          M Andre Z EckenrodeM 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
          • M Andre Z EckenrodeM
            M Andre Z Eckenrode @Mark Olson
            last edited by

            @drghty

            By the way, you wrote “remove the last 5 lines from a text file”, but your example indicates removal of the last 5 characters from each line, so I assume the latter was correct.

            @Mark-Olson

            Ah, yes — my bad, and thanks much for the correction.

            For @drghty , just to make sure you understand why Mark’s correction is potentially important, depending on the total content of your text file, my FIND pattern .{5}$ would also match up to five consecutive newline sequences, if your file has multiple consecutive newlines, if it does not include (?-s), or you don’t have . matches newline disabled.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
            • First post
              Last post
            The Community of users of the Notepad++ text editor.
            Powered by NodeBB | Contributors