Subtractive searching.

Steve Hajdu

I’m looking for a way to perform the following when using notepad++ to search logs.

Lets say I open a log and am searching for the word DELETE, now from those results I wish to exclude any lines with the word SYSTEM. Is there an easy way to do this?

My current workaround is to search for the term I want. Copy the results into a new page, search for the term I don’t want, bookmark those lines, then remove the bookmarked lines. While this method works, it’s extremely tedious.

I’ve tried looking for ways to do this with regex but I’m terrible at it. Any suggestions would greatly help.

Thanks!!

PeterJones

@steve-hajdu ,

What you want are lookahead expressions – positive for the match, and negative for the do-not-match.

(?-s)^(?=.*\bDELETE\b)(?!.*\bSYSTEM\b).*$ will match lines that contain DELETE but do not contain SYSTEM, in either order, possibly with text between

I used a positive lookahead to match anything followed by the whole word DELETE, and a negative lookahead to exclude anything that matches anything followed by the whole word SYSTEM. I then do the .*$ at the end to make it select the whole line that contains DELETE without SYSTEM

Steve Hajdu

@peterjones

This is great, thank you very much