Help with Regex to delete a block in paragraph/line

Reply to Help with Regex to delete a block in paragraph/line on Sun, 10 Dec 2017 14:56:55 GMT

du p — Sun, 10 Dec 2017 14:56:55 GMT

@guy038
Thank you for the thorough explanation

(?-si) works better than expected for me, even when inside the exceed 20 characters.

Reply to Help with Regex to delete a block in paragraph/line on Sun, 10 Dec 2017 15:28:56 GMT

guy038 — Sun, 10 Dec 2017 15:28:56 GMT

Hello @du-p, and All,

Ah, du-p! I understood your problem !

Let’s start with the text, below, where I added three ranges , to you initial text :

Answer misery adieus add wooded how nay men before though.  Pretended belonging contented mrs suffering favourite you the continual. Mrs civil nay least means tried drift. Natural end law whether but and towards certain. Furnished unfeeling his sometimes see day promotion. Quitting informed concerns can men now.

You’ve certainly gave a try to the regex and you were surprised to notice that it matches from to the last block , included ! weren’t you ?

Simply, because the dot ( .), followed by the quantifier * ( or its equivalent {0,} ) represents the greatest range of any standard character, till a > symbol. That’s the default “greedy” behaviour.

And I guess that you wanted to limit the search to the next 20 characters, after , to get individual blocks, only !


This is useless, as you may use the “lazy” behaviour, by adding an interrogation mark, after the * quantifier !
So, the final regex S/R would be :
SEARCH (?-si)
REPLACE Leave EMPTY
OPTIONS Regular expression
ACTION : Replace or Replace All
Notes :


The first part  (?-si) ( equivalent to (?-s)(?-i) ) means that :


The dot special character matches any single standard character, only, and NOT End of Line chars


The search is performed, in a sensitive way. So, it would not match, for instance, the string 




Then it matches the exact string , followed by the smallest range of standard characters, till an ending symbol >



As the replacement zone is empty, theses ranges  are simply deleted



Note that you may, as well, use the 20 characters limit, if you prefer to ! This time, the regex becomes :
(?-si)
Applied against the text below :
Answer misery adieus add wooded how nay men before though.  Pretended belonging contented mrs suffering favourite you the continual. Mrs civil nay least means tried drift. Natural end law whether but and towards certain. Furnished unfeeling his sometimes see day promotion. Quitting informed concerns can men now.

It would miss the last , because 21 digits are located, between  and > !

Best Regards,
guy038



Reply to Help with Regex to delete a block in paragraph/line on Sat, 09 Dec 2017 22:10:44 GMT
Scott Sumner — Sat, 09 Dec 2017 22:10:44 GMT
@du-p
Sorry, if you can’t describe your data well with the first go-round, I lose interest; maybe somebody else can pick it up and help…?



Reply to Help with Regex to delete a block in paragraph/line on Sat, 09 Dec 2017 22:05:45 GMT
du p — Sat, 09 Dec 2017 22:05:45 GMT
Forgot to mention that there can be any character besides the number after the word “block”. Ex:  ,  . I’m wondering what you can delete the block base on the start character “<” and the end character “>”. If I use the wild "* " like  <(.)>, it would select all the character until the end of the paragraph. I’m wondering if there is such a thing so that you can define a range for the wild card. For example something arbitrary like <(20)> would look for 20 characters within the <>.



Reply to Help with Regex to delete a block in paragraph/line on Sat, 09 Dec 2017 21:50:46 GMT
Scott Sumner — Sat, 09 Dec 2017 21:50:46 GMT
@du-p
I would try a Replace operation as follows:
Find-what zone: 

Replace-with zone: make sure this is empty

Search mode:  Regular expression
\d+ stands for one or more digit characters, 0-9.  From your description It is hard to tell what you might need to delete as far as whitespace goes, on either side of the bracketed text…