Regex is driving me up the wall

Anthony Bouttell

I’m having issues with regex.
I have a series of lines in this form:

IIf(ISNULL([text1])<>'' And Left(ISNULL([text2]),4)="Appr",[text3]

I want to insert text in between the’]'and the ‘)’ like this:

IIf(ISNULL([text1],'')<>'' And Left(ISNULL([text2],''),4)="Appr",[text3]

I’ve tried this regular expression

Find what:    (ISNULL.*\])(*.*)
Replace with:  \1,''\2

apparently tagging doesnt appear to work the way I thought it did.
Any help would be greatly appreciated

Scott Sumner

@Anthony-Bouttell

One problem is that your use of .* is grabbing too much. You’ll want to change that to .*? which will match the minimum amount. And then the *.* looks too much like CMD shell wildcard/globbing…

I’m away from Notepad++ at the moment so I can’t actually try it out, but maybe something like this will work, or at least give you a boost:

Find-what zone: ISNULL.*?\]
Replace-with zone: $0,''

In words: match ISNULL through the immediately following closing bracket, replace the match with what was found (represented by $0) plus a comma and two single-quotes.