See my very late regex solution , below :

https://community.notepad-plus-plus.org/post/47905

Best Regards,

guy038

understand now, thank you so much

in fact, I mean
（。＊＼｜）｛９｝。＊

Then why not put it in tick marks? Both the help I linked to and the “how to use markdown code” post explained how to do that, as did my boilerplate text itself.

• `(.*\|){9}.*`

renders as

• (.*\|){9}.*

(.|){9}.

how about this?

in fact, I mean
（。＊＼｜）｛９｝。＊

it can’t show correctly,

To quote my boilerplate:

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).

For images: upload image to imgur. embed images with the syntax ![](http://i.imgur.com/QTHZysa.png). (please use imgur’s “direct link” with i.imgur.com as the hostname and the appropriate .png or .gif extension, rather than the “image” link, which really links to the HTML-wrapper, and will not embed in the forum)

@Allen-Bai

I assume you meant (.\|){9}.
This matches 9 and more pipe delimited lines.

in fact, I mean…

（。＼｜）｛９｝。＊

but it can’t show correctly, and I don’t know how to put screenshot

I assume you meant (.\|){9}.
This matches 9 and more pipe delimited lines.

how about this?

…finding all of the new line/line feed characters - only in those now-bookmarked lines - and replace them with some other character (spaces, dummy chars, whatever) to get each of those records to be on one line

Didn’t we do all this the other day?

Alan’s exp doesn’t match anything in my file

Well, if I copy and paste your “lorem ipsum” data (above) into a new tab and then run my regex (above) on it, I get lines with exactly 9 pipes redmarked, which I thought was the goal (or the inverse of the goal):

So…I really don’t know where the disconnect is…

@Mark-Yorkovich
because it was assumed that all columns contain data

My bad. I didn’t give you all of the details of what I’m working with.

find: ^(?>.*?\|){9}(?!.*?\|) does not make that assumption.

This works.

So at this point what I’d need to do, ideally, is to do a Find/Replace, finding all of the new line/line feed characters - only in those now-bookmarked lines - and replace them with some other character (spaces, dummy chars, whatever) to get each of those records to be on one line. Can I do a find/replace on just the bookmarked lines? Or perhaps, instead of the multi-step approach, is there a way to do this on the Replace tab, entering a regex in the Find what box that finds those lines and just replace the new line characters with dummy characters in one step?

because it was assumed that all columns contain data

find: ^(?>.*?\|){9}(?!.*?\|) does not make that assumption.

@Mark-Yorkovich

I generated with the test data of @Ekopalypse a file of 146545 lines and did that what I’ve suggested above - I got the expected result.

Be sure that the pipe character in your file is really a pipe character (code 124). There is another one (code 166 in Windows-1252 character encoding) which looks nearly identical:

Pipe character: |
The other one: ¦

Yup - they’re pipes.

Here is a good sample of what I’m working with. Lines 1, 9, 10, 11, 16 thru 20 and 36, 37 are single-line records with 9 pipes and 10 columns. Lines 2 thru 8 are one record and together have 9 pipes/10 cols. Similarly, lines 12 through 15 are a single record, and lines 21 thru 35 are a single record.

LOREM120|8 |3 |1 |1 |0 |0 |||INST020
LOREM120|9 |1 |1 |0 |0 |0 ||Lorem Ipsum Dolor]
LOREM: BS/BP

LOREM IPSUM:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.|
IPSUM16|1 |1 |1 |1 |0 |0 |||3001479
IPSUM16|1 |2 |1 |1 |0 |0 |||3003077
IPSUM16|11 |0 |1 |0 |0 |0 |||
IPSUM16|13 |0 |1 |0 |0 |0 ||Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
consectetur adipiscing elit,
sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

consectetur adipiscing elit

consectetur adipiscing elit
consectetur adipiscing elit

consectetur adipiscing elit
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
consectetur adipiscing elit
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.|
DOLOR19|1 |2 |1 |1 |0 |0 |||3003124
LOREM01|1 |1 |1 |1 |1 |0 |||3003024

Your suggested regex ^(?>.+?|){9}(?!.+?|) isn’t finding any matches on that

I generated with the test data of @Ekopalypse a file of 146545 lines and did that what I’ve suggested above - I got the expected result.

Be sure that the pipe character in your file is really a pipe character (code 124). There is another one (code 166 in Windows-1252 character encoding) which looks nearly identical:

Pipe character: |
The other one: ¦

To reiterate: My file is mostly 9 pipes/10 cols per line, but some have less and a few more than that and I need to find those.

make sure your caret is on the first line if you have not checked wrap around

ok, I hope I finally understood this sentence

I got the following hint at https://regex101.com/ when trying your regex:

A repeated capturing group will only capture the last iteration. Put a capturing group around the repeated group to capture all iterations or use a non-capturing group instead if you’re not interested in the data.

Then I read https://www.regular-expressions.info/atomic.html

Together it made me to give the non-capturing group a try.

ok, I hope I finally understood this sentence

Match pattern independently of surrounding patterns, and don’t backtrack into it. Failure to match will cause the whole subject not to match.

which then means that my first attempt, which I was questioning, did backtrack.
which makes your regex is the one which I, and hopefully @Mark-Yorkovich were looking for.

@Alan-Kilborn,
Alan, ja, I guess you are right.

@Mark-Yorkovich, so does this work on your data and the procedure described by
@dinkumoil ?

Was removing the escaping of the | inside the [ and ] intentional? Yes, I suppose, since it has no special meaning there and doesn’t need escaping.

don’t understand why there is a need to make sure that a line does not start with a pipe

I think that with this type of data, fields could be empty, thus if the first field is empty a line would start with a pipe? But, is the regex really saying what I think you implied? I’m saying “not pipe” not just at the start of a line, but for in between fields as well. And I’m only doing it this way because your original attempt using a . expression fails (for some odd and as yet unknown reason). I think I’m getting confused.

I’m trying to match on rows with greater than or less than 9 pipes.

The following regex does the job: ^(?>.+?\|){9}(?!.+?\|). I’m not sure why but it seems to be related to the lack of backtracking due to ?> which turns group one to a non-capturing group.

@Mark-Yorkovich

In the Search & Replace dialog go to the Mark register:

Find what: ^(?>.+?\|){9}(?!.+?\|)
Bookmark line: ticked
Purge for each search: ticked
Wrap around: ticked
Regular expression: ticked

Click Mark All. Go to (menu) Search -> Bookmark -> Inverse Bookmark. Now all lines which do not contain exactly 9 pipe characters are bookmarked.

You can navigate to these lines with F2 (next bookmark) and SHIFT+F2 (previous bookmark).

You can also remove these lines by clicking (menu) Search -> Bookmark -> Remove bookmarked lines.

You can also do the opposite (removing not bookmarked lines) by clicking (menu) Search -> Bookmark -> Remove unmarked lines.

Alan, was this intentional?
(?-s)^([^|\r\n]*?\|){9}(?!(?:.*?\|))
or should it be
(?-s)^([^\|\r\n]*?\|){9}(?!(?:.*?\|))
(which by the way doesn’t seem to have any impact if used or not)

Now given your working example this works also
(?-s)^([^\|]*?\|){9}(?!.*?\|)

But I don’t understand why there is a need to make sure that a line
does not start with a pipe.