Remove last 5 characters from lines in text file?

[drghty]

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 Eckenrode]

@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 Olson]

@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 Eckenrode]

@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.