help with find and replace (wildcards)

Light Portal

Hello, I am repairing some .srt files (subtitles for movies), but it’s tricky. Many different formats.
In text below, for example, I want to be rid of all {\pos(XXX,XXX.XXX), but I don’t know how to make that in notepad. I tried the wildcards of word and vba, no cigar.

00:00:14,790 --> 00:00:21,770
{\pos(201.778,26.666)}战舰波将金号

12
00:00:21,770 --> 00:00:25,200
{\pos(196,170.857)}高斯影业第一制片厂出品

13
00:00:25,200 --> 00:00:28,630
{\pos(196,195.857)}监制 J·M·布里奥克

14
00:00:28,630 --> 00:00:32,180
{\pos(199,207.857)}编剧
N·F·阿加兹汉诺瓦·夏科

15
00:00:32,190 --> 00:00:38,690
{\pos(196,225)}导演 S·M·爱森斯坦
副导演 G·亚力克山德罗夫人

PeterJones

@light-portal said in help with find and replace (wildcards):

I tried the wildcards of word and vba

Notepad++ does not use Word wildcards or VBA wildcards. It uses a flavor of regular expression (wildcards) known as “Boost regex”. This is documented in the official Notepad++ documentation, which can easily be found through the ? menu in Notepad++, in the entry called Notepad++ Online User Manual. There, you will see a whole page on Searching, with a section on Regular Expressions

Specifically, in the Find/Replae dialog, you will need to enable the SEARCH MODE = Regular Expression to enable the wildcard feature.

If i were you, I would search for FIND = {\\pos.*?}. The \\ is used because \ has special meaning to regex, so you need it twice to “escape” it. The .*? means “find 0 or more characters, as few as possible”, so putting it between the pos and the } means it will find up to the first } after the pos. The REPLACE would be blank, because you just want to delete those.

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Light Portal

@peterjones thank you