Delete last words after : at the end of each line

[Vinc Cser]

Hello, i have a txt with 1000 lines each like this
happylion3872:PIFMYJD8:9kjrgmdsjf4vxlc1dkc791fsd7f878
and i want to replace all 1000 lines to only be this
happylion3872:PIFMYJD8

How do i do that? thanks for help in advance

[PeterJones]

@Vinc-Cser, welcome to the Notepad++ Community

You asked:

How do i do that? thanks for help in advance

Assuming you just want to delete the last colon and everything following,

• find = :[^:]*$
• replace = empty
• mode = regular expression

[PeterJones]

@Vinc-Cser
FYI: here is some helpful information for finding out more about regular expressions, and for formatting posts in this forum (especially quoting data) so that we can fully understand what you’re trying to ask:

This forum is formatted using Markdown , with a help link buried on the little grey ? in the COMPOSE window/pane when writing your post. For more about how to use Markdown in this forum, please see @Scott-Sumner’s post in the “how to markdown code on this forum” topic , and my updates near the end . It is very important that you use these formatting tips – using single backtick marks around small snippets, and using code-quoting for pasting multiple lines from your example data files – because otherwise, the forum will change normal quotes ("") to curly “smart” quotes (“”), will change hyphens to dashes, will sometimes hide asterisks (or if your text is c:\folder\*.txt, it will show up as c:\folder*.txt, missing the backslash). If you want to clearly communicate your text data to us, you need to properly format it.

If you have further search-and-replace (“matching”, “marking”, “bookmarking”, regular expression, “regex”) needs, study this FAQ and the documentation it points to. Before asking a new regex question, understand that for future requests, many of us will expect you to show what data you have (exactly), what data you want (exactly), what regex you already tried (to show that you’re showing effort), why you thought that regex would work (to prove it wasn’t just something randomly typed), and what data you’re getting with an explanation of why that result is wrong. When you show that effort, you’ll see us bend over backward to get things working for you. If you need help formatting, see the paragraph above.

Please note that for all regex and related queries, it is best if you are explicit about what needs to match, and what shouldn’t match, and have multiple examples of both in your example dataset. Often, what shouldn’t match helps define the regular expression as much or more than what should match.

[Vinc Cser]

@PeterJones said:

@Vinc-Cser, welcome to the Notepad++ Community

You asked:

How do i do that? thanks for help in advance

Assuming you just want to delete the last colon and everything following,

• find = :[^:]*$
• replace = empty
• mode = regular expression

worked, thanks

[guy038]

Hello @vinc-cser, @Peterjones, and All,

Peter, you beat me to it by a few minutes ;-)). I was thinking about these two solutions :

SEARCH (?-s)^(.+):.+

REPLACE \1

OR :

SEARCH :[^:\r\n]+$

REPLACE Leave EMPTY

Note that your solution :[^:]*$ does not work well when next line(s) does not contain any colon. For instance :

happylion3872:PIFMYJD8:9kjrgmdsjf4vxlc1dkc791fsd7f878
happylion3872:PIFMYJD8:9kjrgmdsjf4vxlc1dkc791fsd7f878
Some text
to see
the problem
happylion3872:PIFMYJD8:9kjrgmdsjf4vxlc1dkc791fsd7f878

So, to prevent grabbing multiple lines , use either :

• My second solution :[^:\r\n]+$ , which does not accept End of line chars before an end of line

• Your solution, slightly modified, :[^:]*?$ , which looks for the nearest “end of line”  location !

---

@vinc-cser, beware that running twice, any of these regex S/R, would delete the part :PIFMYJD8, as well !

Best Regards

guy038