OK… I understand that in real cases, this causes a complete failure of the regex engine :-(( Why ?

Well, let’s suppose the temporary file containing, first, your entire firewall configuration file followed with your entire IP-adresses list file

Now, imagine the worst case : an unique match between the first IP-address of your firewall configuration file and the last IP-address of your IP-adresses list

Then, and despite I use a non-capturing regex group, the part of the regex (?s:.*?...) represents all the characters, included line-endings, right after the first IP-address till the same IP-address excluded, at the very end of file

As you said that your firewall configuration file has about 68,000 lines, it’s easy to guess that it probably exceeds the capacity of the regex engine to handle such a gap of chars !!

So, in order to find out, somehow, a work-around to this situation, could you give me :

• The number of lines of your firewall configuration file and its approximate size

• The number of lines of your IP-addreses list and its approximate size

• A short example of your real firewall configuration file

• A short example of your real IP-addresses list

In order to get the raw text, click on that button, when writing your post, to insert text in the right way !

Thanks for your time to collect these infos !

Best Regards,

guy038

Thank you very much ! you’re a boss !
It works with the last regex.
But is there any limitation ? because it works when I have few lines as config (like 50 lines), but when I use the whole file which has 68000 lines it doesn’t give any result.

Thanks again,
Kind regards,
Chamzon

Ah… , OK ! Then, two possibilities :

• If you want to say that the ip-netmask string may be preceded with possible leading space and/or tabulation characters, choose the following regex :

  • (?-si)^\h*ip-netmask\x20\K(.+)$(?=(?s:.*?^\1$))

• If you want to say that any non-null string, may precede the space char and the ip_address, which ends each current line, choose the following regex :

  • (?-si)^.+\x20\K(.+)$(?=(?s:.*?^\1$))

Best Regards,

guy038

The reason it didn’t work is that your screenshot misrepresented the data. Regex are highly tailored to example data, and when you make us guess, we guess wrong.

https://community.notepad-plus-plus.org/topic/22022/faq-desk-template-for-search-replace-questions

Thank you very much Guy038 ! It’s so kind.

I’m not very familiar with the reghex but I see it’s very powerful !
In my example, the word “ip-netmask” is not the begining of the line,
so how can i change this to search any word at the begining ?

Thank you

for the moment, it gives me only one (wrong) result

You can easily achieve your goal with a regular expression search !

Here is the road map :

• Open a new N++ tab ( Ctrl + N )

• First, paste the contents of your firewall configuration file ( Ctrl + V )

• Then, append the contents of your ip-adresses list, right after

Starting, for instance, with this example text :

tag RJPROJ
ip-netmask 192.168.2.4
tag RJPROJ
ip-netmask 192.168.2.152
tag RJPROJ
ip-netmask 192.168.2.24
tag RJPROJ
ip-netmask 192.168.2.25
tag RJPROJ
ip-netmask 10.7.18.188
tag RJPROJ
ip-netmask 10.7.18.28
tag RJPROJ
ip-netmask 10.7.18.29
tag RJPROJ
ip-netmask 10.7.18.249
tag RJPROJ
ip-netmask 10.7.18.226
tag RJPROJ
ip-netmask 10.7.18.12
tag FJPROJ
ip-netmask 10.7.18.13
tag FJPROJ
ip-netmask 10.7.18.16
tag FJPROJ
ip-netmask 10.7.16.2
10.7.16.2
10.7.16.5
10.7.16.6
10.7.16.7
10.7.16.8
10.7.18.11
10.7.18.16
10.7.18.17
10.7.18.18
10.7.18.22
10.7.18.226
10.7.23.1
10.7.23.66
10.7.23.45
10.7.23.44
10.7.23.26
10.7.23.156
10.7.23.16
10.7.18.188

• Now, open the MARK dialog ( Ctrl + M )

  • SEARCH (?s-i)^ip-netmask\x20\K(.+)$(?=.*?^\1)

  • Un-tick all options

  • Tick the Bookmark line, Purge for each search and Wrap around options

  • Select the Regular expression search mode

  • CLick on the Mark All button => 4 matches !

• From this point, you can, either :

  • Click on the Copy Marked Text button and paste all the IP-adresses elsewhere

  • Use the menu option Search > Bookmark > Copy Bookmarked Lines and paste all these specific lines elsewhere

Best Regards,

guy038

This plugin is usually used to find the differernce between two files that are similar, like a newer copy of the same document to see the changes that were made, like in program code files.