Community
    • Login

    PFE's find & extend selection

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Notepad++ & Plugin Development
    3 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.
    • Erik van der VlugtE
      Erik van der Vlugt
      last edited by

      Hi all,

      Is someone aware of a plugin that copies PFE’s find & extend selection functionality?
      Alternatively this would be a feature request to enhancde NPP standard.

      For those that don’t know PFE, in Find has a checkbox for “Extend selection” meaning that when checked all text from the cursor postion until the first find will be selected allowing quick copying chunks of text out of long files.

      In my case it would be extremely helpfull working with saved streams out of streamserve but I can imagine many more usefull cases.

      Thanks, Erik

      Claudia FrankC 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Claudia FrankC
        Claudia Frank @Erik van der Vlugt
        last edited by

        @Erik-van-der-Vlugt

        do you know the Begin/End Select feature?
        Click on it, do your search and another click selects the text.
        If you assign a shortcut I assume you can get faster result than using the mouse
        to check a checkbox (which isn’t currently available).

        Cheers
        Claudia

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • guy038G
          guy038
          last edited by guy038

          Hello Erik van der Vlugt

          You can easily simulate this functionality, by an appropriate regular expression :-))

          Two possibilities :

          • If you want to select from cursor location till the next character, word, string or even regular expression matched, INcluded, just put the regex (?s).+?, before your search

          • If you want to select from cursor location till the next character, word, string or even regular expression matched, EXcluded, just put the regex (?s).+?(?=, before your search and end this regex with a closing round bracket !

          Moreover :

          • If your search is case insensitive, use, at the beginning, the in-line modifier (?si)

          • If your search is case sensitive, use, at the beginning, the in-line modifier (?s-i)

          • If your search looks for a whole word, only, add the \b syntax, just after your search


          So, let’s consider the contents of the N++ license.txt

          • Move back at the very beginning of your file ( CTRL + Origin )

          • Open the Find dialog ( CTRL + F )

          • Select the Regular expression search mode

          Then, for instance :

          • The regex (?si).+?License would match from cursor location, till the string License, included, whatever its case ( 15 matches )

          • The regex (?s-i).+?(?=License) would match from cursor location, till the exact string License, excluded ( 6 matches )

          • The regex (?si).+?License\b would match from cursor location, till the word License, included, whatever its case ( 10 matches )

          • The regex (?s-i).+?(?=License\b) would match from cursor location, till the exact word License, excluded ( 5 matches )

          Of course, you regex can, also, be a regular expression, itself ! For instance, the regex ?si).+?Th[eo]se would match from cursor location till the word those or these, included, whatever its case !


          Notes :

          • The (?s) modifier forces the regex engine to consider that the dot meta-character can match, absolutely, any character ( standard and EOL characters ). So the regex .+ can matches any non-null range of characters, even located on several lines.

          • The question mark ?, placed after the syntax .+ ensures that the shortest range, between the cursor location and your own search expression, will be selected !

          • The syntax (?=.....) is a positive look-ahead assertion. At cursor position, that condition must be true in order to valid the overall match, although this condition is NOT a part of the final regex to match !

          IMPORTANT :

          • For keeping this Find and Select behaviour, just close the Find dialog, with the ESC key, and go on, hitting the F3 key, for matching the other occurrences !

          • The very nice thing is that you just select the previous range(s), if you hit the SHIFT + F3 shortcut !

          Best Regards,

          guy038

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