I’m really grateful and if anyone has a buy me coffee page or any other way I can at least symbolically show my gratitude let me know.

I can take care of that as well:

Next day I also needed exactly the regex you shared and it worked perfectly without breaking any code indents, just awesome! I’ll surely use it again in near future it would be really time consuming to try to change line order manually.

Thank you so so much for taking the time and effort to share your solution and making it so clear to understand I really appreciate it.

@guy038 and @Alan-Kilborn

Thank you both for your time and solutions I’m really grateful and if anyone has a buy me coffee page or any other way I can at least symbolically show my gratitude let me know.

Have a great day ( :

Let’s try a general method regarding the move of a first <tag> line before or after a second <tag> line, both located in a same <tag>...........</tag> section

To simplify the problem, I assume that any <tag>..........</tag> range, between the first and second tag included, is located in a single line ( not splitted over several lines ! )

• Let the first tag met, be called <tag_A>

• Let the second tag met, be called <tag_B>

Then, we can imagine the generic regex S/R, below :

SEARCH (?-s)(^\h*<tag_A>.*\R)(?s)(.*)(?-s)(^\h*<tag_B>.*\R)

REPLACE \3\1\2    ( tag_B line is moved right before the <tag_A> line )
REPLACE \1\3\2    ( tag_B line is moved right after    the <tag_A> line )
REPLACE \2\1\3    ( tag_A line is moved right before the <tag_B> line )
REPLACE \2\3\1    ( tag_A line is moved right after    the <tag_B> line )
REPLACE \3\2\1    ( tag_A line and <tag>_B line are switched )

In your case, given your INITIAL text, below :

<blablabla>
	<edm:WebResource rdf:about="link.html>
		<dcterms:extent>17976 KB</dcterms:extent>
		<dc:rights>Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons CC BY License</dc:rights>
		<edm:rights rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"/>
		<dc:format>PDF</dc:format>
		<dcterms:created>30.3.2015</dcterms:created>
	</edm:WebResource>

With the practical following regex S/R :

SEARCH (?-s)(^\h*<dc:rights>.*\R)(?s)(.*)(?-s)(^\h*<dcterms:created>.*\R)

REPLACE \1\3\2

We get the expected results :

<blablabla>
	<edm:WebResource rdf:about="link.html>
		<dcterms:extent>17976 KB</dcterms:extent>
		<dc:rights>Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons CC BY License</dc:rights>
		<dcterms:created>30.3.2015</dcterms:created>
		<edm:rights rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"/>
		<dc:format>PDF</dc:format>
	</edm:WebResource>

Best Regards,

guy038

Thank you for your help and pointers, was just trying to figure out how to adapt the regex so that the insides of first tag don’t have to be specified since they are not identical to every opened file.

This works, just some line breaks to fix. Sorry for the confusion.

(<dc:rights>.*)(?s)(.*?)(<dcterms:created>.*?</dcterms:created>\R)

Looking at your expressions…they way you used * is "command-line"ish, not regular-expression-ish.

So, * means “zero or more of the thing preceding”

thing is often a single character or metacharacter, or it could be something in parens…

Examples:

z* : zero or more, as many as possible, of z
.* : zero or more, as many as possible, of “any single character”
(abc)* : zero or more, as many as possible, of a run of abc

also note:

z*? : zero or more, as few as possible, of z
.*? : zero or more, as few as possible, of “any single character”
(abc)*? : zero or more, as few as possible, of a run of abc

There’s really no way to grasp this except reading the docs and experimenting…

You are right it works on provided example, but not on XML I’m trying to change.

I understand the general idea and played around with the regex, but don’t know why it doesn’t work jet. Tried to simplify it for easier understanding and so that it’s applicable to many situations.

I removed some clutter at start of xml, what I’m trying to do is for example move line with tag dcterms:created after the line dc:rights among other moves.

My guesstimate is that it doesn’t work because of xml structure, indents or something else.

<blablabla>
	<edm:WebResource rdf:about="link.html>
		<dcterms:extent>17976 KB</dcterms:extent>
		<dc:rights>Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons CC BY License</dc:rights>
		<edm:rights rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"/>
		<dc:format>PDF</dc:format>
		<dcterms:created>30.3.2015</dcterms:created>
	</edm:WebResource>

So a potential problem with “generalizing” your problem for posting is that you make it too general and it doesn’t work for your real use case.

Given that, I think this transforms your generalized example:

Find: (<something>\R)(?s)(.*?)(<tag3>.*?<tag3>\R)
Replace: ${1}${3}${2}
Search mode: regular expression