I need to insert a special character at the beginning of a line

[JustinJudo]

In a simple text file, I have the following lines:

#–output blah blah 1
#–output blah blah 2
#–output blah blah 3
–output blah blah 4
#–output blah blah 5

I need to insert the hashtag symbol inserted at the beginning of line # 4 – but ONLY for those lines that does not start with #.

If I do a simple find & replace operation on the two hyphens like this:

find: –
replace with: #–

I get the following result which is not want I want.

##–output blah blah 1
##–output blah blah 2
##–output blah blah 3
#–output blah blah 4
##–output blah blah 5

Is there a RegEx solution for this?

[PeterJones]

@JustinJudo said in I need to insert a special character at the beginning of a line:

Is there a RegEx solution for this?

Yes.

FIND = ^(?!#)
REPLACE = #

-> from the beginning of line, where the next character is not a hashtag, replace the beginning of the line with a hashtag

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Useful References

• Please Read Before Posting
• Template for Search/Replace Questions
• Formatting Forum Posts
• Notepad++ Online User Manual: Searching/Regex
• FAQ: Where to find other regular expressions (regex) documentation

[JustinJudo]

@PeterJones Thank you Peter, I appreciate the solution. Man you’re so good with this stuff… I wish I knew how to do RegEx. I’ve looked it before but it just seem so difficult to learn!