sort file removing duplicates possible?

Scott Sumner

I’m glad you have a solution. Yeah, the empty line thing with sorting is rather bad, but the end-user can’t control this behavior of the sorting. I think I’ve changed my mind and it is probably best to alter the regular expression a bit in order to handle the situation where there is a duplicate-but-without-line-ending at the end of the file. So I’d suggest changing it to:

(?-s)^(.*)\R(?s)(?=.*^\1(?:\R|\z))

I’ve done two things to this regex:

I removed the (?: and ) around the first \R (a simplification discussed earlier so no need to say any more here)
The final \R was changed to (?:\R|\z) (see discussion below)

The \R|\z part is what allows an almost-duplicate at the end-of-file-without-line-ending to be detected. The new part to this is the \z which roughly means “match only at the very end of the data”.

The (?: and ) was added so that the | only affects the \R that precedes it and the \z that follows it

guy038

Hello @patrickdrd, @scott-sumner and All,

Generally speaking, when you want to remove duplicate lines, from a PREVIOUSLY SORTED list, just use this simple regex S/R, below :

SEARCH (?-s)(.*\R)\1+

REPLACE \1

This regex is quite fast, because, in case of numerous duplicates, the part \1+ grabs all the duplicates ( with their EOL characters ), at once and just rewrites the first item of each block :-))

IMPORTANT : the last item of your sorted list must be followed by EOL character(s) !

Cheers,

guy038

patrickdrd

after trying both the macro and the textfx solution for a long time,
I’ve seen that still ultraedit’s sorting works much better than both of them,
I first rejected the macro for textfx’s favor but I found out lately that neither the latter does a good job, at least I prefer the sorting done by ultraedit ,sorry,
I don’t have an example at the moment, I’ll post again when I do

Claudia Frank

@patrickdrd

sorry, did not read the whole thread but what about a python one liner?

editor.setText('\r\n'.join(list(set(editor.getText().splitlines()))))

Cheers
Claudia

Claudia Frank

@patrickdrd

forgot sorting

editor.setText('\r\n'.join(sorted(list(set(editor.getText().splitlines())))))

Cheers
Claudia

patrickdrd

thanks, I’m keeping that too and I’ll let you know

patrickdrd

ok, I tested, this doesn’t work either somehow, at least doesn’t work like ue’s one, i.e.

I tested with easylist from: https://easylist.to/easylist/easylist.txt (69883 lines),
ue’s function cuts it to: 69238

npp results:
python scipt: 69818
macro (scott) is a bit slow and results in 19610 lines (!) and
textfx results in 69818 as well

guy038 regular expression results in 28109 lines,
according to my experience, I bet that ue’s result is the correct one,
at least to my taste

Claudia Frank

@patrickdrd

could you, by any chance, upload the ue cutted list?
To see the differences.

Cheers
Claudia

patrickdrd

yes, of course, please tell me where, pastebin doesn’t work, it’s blocked here (at work),
any other suggestions?

Claudia Frank

actually pastebin is my first choice as well and haven’t used others for quite some time now.

Heard about

https://www.zippyshare.com/
https://www.sendspace.com/

should be good and anonymous but haven’t tried it so far.

Cheers
Claudia

Scott Sumner

Yea, I used to be a fan of regular expression replacement when doing this, but with “larger” datasets there always seems like there is so much tweaking and experimentation needed to get it right (for a particular dataset) that it is hardly worth it, unless you like playing with regular expressions all day instead of solving a particular problem and moving on quickly.

A Pythonscript solution such as @Claudia-Frank 's seems fine…

patrickdrd

ok, but why results are inconsistent (with large datasets)?

@Claudia-Frank, unfortunately I’m not able to access zippyshare either,
so I’ll upload to pastebin from home if we don’t find another solution

Claudia Frank

@patrickdrd

I installed the ue trial version but can’t find the menu item to delete the duplicates.
Is there anything I need to install in addition or am I blind and don’t see the obvious?

Cheers
Claudia

Claudia Frank

ok - found it - obviously blind :-D

Cheers
Claudia

Scott Sumner

@patrickdrd said:

ok, but why results are inconsistent (with large datasets)?

Various reasons, sometimes a regular expression approach to this needs to be refined to match the data better before it works well. If you search up some other threads on this topic you can trace through the evolution of a regex approach on certain datasets. However, I suspect you just want to get a workable solution and move on…and I fully endorse that. I’m tired of trying to use regex for this kind of thing. :)

BTW, @Claudia-Frank going the extra mile…installing UE trial version just to track this down…nice!

Claudia Frank

@Scott-Sumner

… boots are made for walking … :-)

I’m confused about how UE does sort and delete duplicates.
Used default settings.

Only sorting

Sorting and deleting duplicates

There is obviously something wrong about UEs algorithm, isn’t it?
And the version I used cut the list to 63732 lines.

Cheers
Claudia

patrickdrd

so… another number? amazing!

I’ve got version 16 which is lite somehow

Claudia Frank

me too - that is actually the latest one available for ubuntu.

Cheers
Claudia

patrickdrd

so the issue is: which result is the correct?

guy038

Hello, @patrickdrd, and All,

First of all, I quite pleased to be back on our N++ forum ! Indeed, I was away because of a general failure of my laptop hard drive C:, which, you could imagine, highly annoyed me and needed immediate care :-(((

So, after more than a week, a software purchase of EaseUS Recovery Wizard to restore my data ( the only one which could identify all my files, although Windows could not see the C: partition ), the fact that my first 32 Gb USB key did not work, either, ( Windows cannot format it !!), the re-install of the system on an other hard-disk, the Services Pack, the .NET versions, the different updates, some software installations and the total re-organization of my data structure, I can, now, close that bloody sub-routine !! ( Just note that, if I haven’t been able to get all my files back, I still had a last general backup, performed on the 04/13/18 )

Now, @patrickdrd, you said, in a post above :

guy038 regular expression results in 28109 lines

So, I download the list, from your link, in a new N++ tab :

https://easylist.to/easylist/easylist.txt

Notice that I, personally, found 69889 lines

Now, without any change on that text, I simply performed a sort with the N++ command Edit > Line Operations > Sort Lines Lexicographically Ascending, on that raw text

Then, I used the regex S/R, that I spoke in my previous post :

SEARCH : (?-s)(^.+\R)\1+

REPLACE : \1

I obtained a file of 69790 lines => The difference of 99 lines ( the duplicate ones ) were suppressed, almost immediately !

So, may be, I’m missing something ?

Cheers,

guy038