I need to delete two characters in two continuous lines

Billy Martin

Hi, I need your help to solve one, I suppose, single thing… I have some files with data in this format:
[
-90.67575919025678,
14.12140539076991,
0
],
[
-90.67691295444409,
14.11436171657998,
0
],
…

The thing is that I need to delete the last two characters in the square brackets the “,” and the “0”, so it must seem like:

[
-90.67575919025678,
14.12140539076991
],
[
-90.67691295444409,
14.11436171657998
],

Any suggestion on how can I do that?

Thanks,

Billy

Alan Kilborn

@Billy-Martin

Well, if all your data is really that simple, this seems to match it:

FInd ,\R0\R(?=])
Search mode: Regular expression

You can replace it with “nothing”.

I’d be careful using it, though. There might be more to the story that you haven’t told us.

Billy Martin

Thanks Alan, I’ve tried that expression but it says that cannot find the text.

Alan Kilborn

@Billy-Martin

I copied the original text you gave out of the forum and into Notepad++. Then I used the Find expression I provided. It matched for me.

Karsten75

Just tried it the same as Alan, it worked for me and reported that two occurrences were found/deleted.

Meta Chuh

@Billy-Martin

your original text is:

[
              -90.67575919025678,
              14.12140539076991,
              0
            ],
            [
              -90.67691295444409,
              14.11436171657998,
              0
            ],
...

The thing is that I need to delete the last two characters in the square brackets the "," and the "0", so it must seem like:

[
              -90.67575919025678,
              14.12140539076991
            ],
            [
              -90.67691295444409,
              14.11436171657998
            ],

you have to embed it between two lines of ``` (tripple backticks) otherwise your code gets stripped.

best regards.

Billy Martin

Hi… Thanks… I’ve tried that in a new document and worked either. But in the original files the strings starts after three tab spaces… how can I add them into the search expression to match the string? is there any tab char I can add or how to add the 15 blank spaces between?

        [
          -90.89344601114183,
          14.26720713414475,
          0
        ],
        [
          -90.89410910416692,
          14.2672050050027,
          0
        ],
        [
          -90.89397902924168,
          14.26244600987243,
          0
        ]

PeterJones

@Billy-Martin ,

I believe you should be able to update your find to: ,\R\h*0\R(?=\h*]). The \h* adds a match of 0 or more horizontal spaces (space or tab).

Actually, given your original spec, saying the closing ] should be on a separate line, I would actually say

,\R\h*0(?=\R\h*])
(which moves the newline after the 0 to not be deleted)

For me, this converts

        [
          -90.89344601114183,
          14.26720713414475,
          0
        ],
        [
          -90.89410910416692,
          14.2672050050027,
          0
        ],
        [
          -90.89397902924168,
          14.26244600987243,
          0
        ]

to

        [
          -90.89344601114183,
          14.26720713414475
        ],
        [
          -90.89410910416692,
          14.2672050050027
        ],
        [
          -90.89397902924168,
          14.26244600987243
        ]

guy038

Hello @billy-martin, @peterjones and All,

Ah ! Nice, Peter, I was about to post a solution, but you beat me to it ;-))

And, of course, our solutions are identical

SEARCH ,\R\h*0(?=\R\h*],)

REPLACE Leave EMPTY

So, I just give some explanations to Billy, on this regex S/R :

The \R syntax represents any form of line-break ( \r\n for Windows files, \n for Unix files and \r for Mac files )
The \h* part matches any range, even null, of horizontal blank characters, i.e. space, tabulation and no-breaking space character, of respective Unicode values \x{0020}, \x{0009} and \x{00A0 )
The character [, being a regex meta-character, must be escaped with the \ character, to be interpreted as a literal
So, the search regex looks for a comma, followed with a line-break, then some possible blank chars and, finally, a zero
But ONLY IF the look-ahead structure (?=\R\h*],) is true i. e. if the zero digit is immediately followed with a line-break, then possible blank characters and, finally, the string ],
As the replace zone is empty, the search match ,\R\h*0, described above, is simply deleted

Best Regards

guy038

PeterJones

This has nothing to do with the main topic. Sorry for the tangent, but I’m curious:

@Meta-Chuh said:

@Billy-Martin,
your original text is:

Meta, how do you see what the original text was? In some other forums, I am able to view the source of the post, and that shows the pre-edited version… but I when I view the source in the Notepad++ Community forum, I don’t see anything with the spaces. Where did you get the original from?

Billy Martin

Thank you guys… it worked as expected and as desired.

Thanks a lot… it really helps me a lot and makes my life easier.

Best regards,

Billy

Alan Kilborn

@PeterJones said:

Meta, how do you see what the original text was?

@Meta-Chuh YEA! How about it Meta??