I haven’t noticed the relation between the Begin/End select feature and the column mode selection, yet ! Many thanks for these very nice tricks, indeed !

Cheers,

guy038

How about one more? You don’t have to use the mouse for the column-select: At a starting point, invoke Begin/End Select. Move the caret downward to a new point, then Shift+Alt+RightArrow to highlight a single character that you want as the last character in the column block. Invoke Begin/End again. Boom…column block. :)

Also works similarly if the starting point is below the ending point…

It might be little-known that you can also do column-selections with it, for example, invoke Begin/End Select at a starting point, move to a different point by alt+Lclick, then invoke Begin/End Select again and you get a column block between the two points.

I just found out another solution

I searched for 2016-10-02 from top of the doc and 2016-10-02 00:00:09 was marked
Then I clicked on Edit and Mark start/end from the Notepad menu
Made another search for 2016-10-02 but checked Loop and Up and 2016-10-02 00:00:39 was marked
Edit and Mark start/end again. Hepp! The span was marked up and easy to copy.

Thanks Jim and Scott. i have been learning a lot from your answers.

I tried your example data, and inserted some dummy lines in between your “PLAY” lines because I’m guessing that is what your situation really looks like (to account for 2 million lines).

I had some good luck with this search setup:

Open the Find dialog; select the Find tab within it
In the Find What box, put (?s)^(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}).+\1(?-s).+
Take care not to have any leading/trailing/embedded spaces in that!
Select Regular Expression as the search mode
Move the caret to the very top of your file
Press the Find Next button
The entire first day’s “PLAY” line matches should get selected and then can be Copy’d to the clipboard
Press the Find Next button again
The second day’s “PLAY” matches will get selected…
This really isn’t much different from Jim’s solution, just a bit more generic.

This can be extended to make even more refinements, but given the spec that was given… :)

Not sure what you mean about a regex plugin, but what Jim and I have described requires no plugin.

But just to try to show what I mean. This is how our data looks like in short and the users are marked Xxxxx
I want to search and mark 2016-10-01 23.59.18 to 2016-10-01 23.59.49 It is tedious to do it manually when the full file contains over 2 millions of lines.

2016-10-01 23:59:18 PLAY Xxxxx
2016-10-01 23:59:29 PLAY Xxxxx
2016-10-01 23:59:39 PLAY Xxxxx
2016-10-01 23:59:49 PLAY Xxxxx
2016-10-02 00:00:09 PLAY Xxxxx
2016-10-02 00:00:29 PLAY Xxxxx
2016-10-02 00:00:39 PLAY Xxxxx

I have been searching for this regex plugin and found an dll file that I have installed but can’t see how to bring that regex dialog window up…

I would think that a regex search should be able to do this. Something like:

^.*2016-10-01 06:00:00(.*\R)+.*2016-01-01 23:59:59.*\R

should mark the first line containing 2016-10-01 06:00:00 through the line containing 2016-01-01 23:59:59.

You didn’t clarify anything between post #1 and post #2. :)

I think more detail is needed…what has been specified about your data isn’t enough for someone to help well. YOU can see your data so it is clear in your mind, but for anyone wanting to help what you’ve said just leads to more questions when they think about implementing a solution.

I have an massive 2 150 998 line long log file.
Need to search and mark between (for an example) 2016-01-01 06:00:00 and 2016-01-01 23:59:59, so I can copy it to Spreadsheet

Find many solutions of search and replace, but I just need to find the data and copy it.