Joining every 100000 lines into 1 line

[M P]

Hi. I have 10 million lines and need to join every 100000 lines into 1 line, with the goal of having 100 lines in the end.

I have found an approach that works like this:

Find: (.)\r\n(.)\r\n(.)\r\n(.)\r\n(.*)\r\n
Replace with: \1\2\3\4\5\r\n

but the result is not quite what I want after repeating that process multiple times, as i don’t have exactly multiple 100000 lines each joined in 1 line in the end.

Would love to get some help here.

[Terry R]

@M-P said in Joining every 100000 lines into 1 line:

but the result is not quite what I want after repeating that process multiple times, as i don’t have exactly multiple 100000 lines each joined in 1 line in the end.
Would love to get some help here.

I found this question rather intriguing, fully expecting Notepad++ to be overwhelmed with either the sheer number of lines and/or the number of possible characters when combining those lines. I must say I have been pleasantly surprised.

I created a 20 character line, then replicated that 10 times. Copied all and replicated that 10 times. Continue that theme until I had my 10M lines with a grand total of 220M characters.

I then ran the regex you see below. The first iteration took approximately 5 mins (I didn’t think to start the stopwatch) to complete. The second iteration took about 30 seconds, then 8 seconds, and subsequent iterations took about 5 seconds each time.

And lo and behold it actually worked, whereas I had thought it would have crashed.

So as you can see I worked on the “power of 10” and just ran the regex 6 times to get the 100 lines required. I was somewhat surprised to see you’d worked with 5 lines at a time, when I thought it would be obvious that 10 was the number of lines to aim for.

I note that your regex seems to only look for 1 character per line. If that’s true then you should have no problem with my solution.

Find What:(?-s)(.+)\R(.+)\R(.+)\R(.+)\R(.+)\R(.+)\R(.+)\R(.+)\R(.+)\R(.+)
Replace With:${1}${2}${3}${4}${5}${6}${7}${8}${9}${10}

Terry

[guy038]

Hello, @m-p, @terry-r and All,

I’ve got a solution almost similar to @terry-r’s one !

SEARCH (?-s)^(.+)\R(.+)\R(.+)\R(.+)\R(.+)\R(.+)\R(.+)\R(.+)\R(.+)\R(.+\R)

REPLACE $1$2$3$4$5$6$7$8$9$10

Note that I include the line-break in group 10

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Unlike in @terry-r 's solution, you just need to click 5 times, consecutively, on the Replace All button

So, the time to go from power 10^1 to power 10^5 !

Best Regards,

guy038

[M P]

@Terry-R @guy038 Thank you so much! You guys saved me a lot of time. It works perfectly accurate