expression for specific words

kracovwolf

So I got this expression

^.*\(.*?\).*\R
It's for removing all lines containing parenthesis.  But how do I alter it to only target lines that say (music playing) and (ominous music playing)?

mkupper

@kracovwolf said in expression for specific words:

s expression ^.(.?).*\R

I think something got lost when posting what you tried to the forums.

The expression was probably ^.*\(.?\).*\R which will remove lines that contain either () or (.) where the dot is any character.

It’s for removing all lines containing parenthesis. But how do I alter it to only target lines that say (music playing) and (ominous music playing)?

Try this: ^.*\((music playing|ominous music playing)\).*\R

You can make it a little more compact using ^.*\((ominous )?music playing\).*\R

A \( or \) says to match a parentheses in the text,

kracovwolf

@mkupper
isn’t there a better wildcard to also target other ones like suspenseful music playing, etc?

kracovwolf

how do I also include eerie music, heroic music, etc?

Mark Olson

@kracovwolf said in expression for specific words:

how do I also include eerie music, heroic music, etc?

It sounds like you want to match lines that contain the word music. Assuming this is correct, the regular expression (?i-s).*?music.* will match any line that contains that word.

EXPLANATION:

The (?i-s) flag at the beginning makes . not match newline, and turns ignorecase on (I’m assuming you would like to match Music and MUSIC as well as music)
.*?music consumes all characters in a line until the word music
.* consumes the rest of the characters in the line

REFERENCES: https://npp-user-manual.org/docs/searching/#regular-expressions

kracovwolf

@Mark-Olson no, this is in subtitle files. so it has to be strictly “music playing” or “(# music playing)”. How do I do that instead, I don’t know about spacing between the words. this?
(?i-s).*?music playing.*

Mark Olson

@kracovwolf
\s+ matches any number of whitespace characters.

I’m not going to give you any more hints on basic regex usage - I will once again recommend that you read the user manual’s topic on regular expressions.

While learning regular expressions may be slow going (it took me a long time to get where I am now), believe me when I say that (1) it is worth the effort, and (2) you can’t get there by asking others for the answer.

kracovwolf

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