How to select *A to *B in Notepad++

pranav garware

We have many lines (more than 100000) in between two commands (each starts with *).
If I have to select everything from *A to *B how to select it? (let us assume that we don’t know the line number and I don’t want to scroll down too long either)

PeterJones

@pranav-garware said:

How to select *A to *B in Notepad++

Assuming the data:

prefix
*A
10000 lines
*B
suffix

using Find what: (?s)^\*A.*^\*B, Search Mode = regular expression will find everything from *A to *B, inclusive. Explanation:

(?s): turn on .-matches-EOL (thus ignoring the state of the checkbox in the dialog box)
^\*A: match from beginning of line, a literal * and a literal A
.*: match 0 or more characters (ie, all your lines in between)
^\*B: match from beginning of line, a literal * and a literal B

Tweaks will be necessary if it’s not really A and B. Tweaks will be necessary if you want to exclude the command lines.

If you want a better answer, provide more info.

Also, read the following:
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FYI: I often add this to my response in regex threads, unless I am sure the original poster has seen it before. 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.

Alan Kilborn

@pranav-garware said:

I don’t want to scroll down too long either

An often overlooked N++ command is Begin/End Select on the Edit menu. Find where you want your eventual selection to start and run that command. Then find where you want the future selection to stop (maybe use a Find action for this…or big scrollbar drag…or whatever…) and invoke the command again. Blammo, you now have a big marked selection.