for regex - is it possible to move a word from the beginning of the line to the end of the line?

Robin Cruise

everyone. is it possible to move a word from the beginning of the line to the end of the line, and the one from the end to be place at the beginning of the line? It’s a change of places, viceversa

For example:

Paul is at home with his brother John.

Must become:

John is at home with his brother Paul.

can this be done with regex?

Robin Cruise

I try this regex, but not a great solution:

(^\w+) - select the first word on the beginning of each line
(\w*$) - select the last word at the end of the line

Search: (^\w+).*?(\w*$)
Replace by: \2\1

Alan Kilborn

@Robin-Cruise

This seems to work for your data, but there’s probably more to what you really need:

find: (?-s)^(\w+)(.*?)(\w+)\.
repl: \3\2\1.

Abed99

find : ^(\w+)\s(.*)\s(\w+)(\.)?
replace with : $3\x20$2\x20$1$4

Robin Cruise

thank you all. Of course, in the end I find myself a solution:

Search: (^\w+)(.*?)(\w*)\.$
Replace by: \3\2\1.

guy038

Hello, @robin-cruise, and All,

I suppose that, if the sentence contains a single word, followed with a full stop like Paul., it should not be concerned by the replacement, ins’t it ?

So, the correct regex S/R is :

SEARCH (?-s)^(\w+)\b(.+)\b(\w+)\.$

REPLACE \3\2\1.

Notes :

The \b assertions ensure that the group \1 and group 3 contain true words, i.e. the first and last character of group 2 are non-word characters
In group 2 we just can use a greedy quantifier + ( not +? ) as we’re looking for the last word of current line, anyway !
As the search regex contains three expressions with the + quantifier, this means that each group is not empty. And, in case of the minimal sentence Paul John., the group 2 is just the space char between the two firstnames !

Best Regards,

guy038