Help with finding prefixes & selecting entire string

Miska Virtanen

Hello!

I just wanted to ask, if there was a relatively simple way to find the prefix to a string, and automatically highlight the entire string with Find & Replace. What I’m trying to do is mass edit CSV files. The strings are separated by commas.
Let’s say a file has data like this;
bb_1234,aa_1233,cb_1244

If I wanted to find all the strings starting with “bb_”, and highlight & replace the entire string, up until the next comma. So replacing the bb_ prefix data with something like ZZZ should make the data appear as;
ZZZ,aa_1233,cb_1244

Thank you in advance!

Terry R

@Miska-Virtanen said in Help with finding prefixes & selecting entire string:

If I wanted to find all the strings starting with “bb_”, and highlight & replace the entire string, up until the next comma.

That can be done simply with a regular expression (regex). Using the Replace function you would have
Find What:\bbb_[^,]+
Replace With:ZZZ
Search mode must be set to regular expression.

It didn’t sound as if it was only at the start of a line, hence my regex will look for that sequence in any “cell”. If this isn’t what you actually wanted you will need to elaborate.

Terry