Selecting things of a certain type

JacksonSpike · Jun 7, 2023, 4:36 PM

Hi, I was wondering whether I could select things that the application sees as separate things. I’m very new to Notepad++. I was editing a minecraft language file and I want an easy way to select all the strings so I can change them to uppercase all at once. Please help. Thanks!
Here’s the file I was working on:

PeterJones · Jun 7, 2023, 6:02 PM

@JacksonSpike ,

Your use of the phrases “certain type” or “separate things” is rather ambiguous.

If you have a selection in Notepad++, then Edit > Convert Case To… > UPPERCASE (or the Ctrl+Shift+U default keyboard shortcut) will convert the active selection to all-caps.

For manually selecting multiple pieces of text at the same time, Settings > Preferences > Editing > ☑ Enable Multi-Editing will allow you to use Ctrl+Click (and drag) to select multiple pieces of text at the same time.

Or, if you have a search expression (in Regular Expression mode ) that can find all the text that you want to uppercase, if your Find What already finds the right text, then Replace With can be set to \U$0 to replace the found text with the uppercase version of the text.

But without more detail than you gave, I can only give this hints.

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(The links above were taken from various sections of the Online User Manual)

Useful References

Mark Olson · Jun 7, 2023, 11:22 PM

Find/replace (?-si)(?::\s*"|(?<!%)%\d*[dsf]|(?!\A)\G)\K((?:(?!(?:(?<!%)%\d*[dsf]|")).)*) with \U\1\E.

Note that this won’t actually convert all your text to upper-case, because some of it (the %s format specifiers ) will probably cause bugs downstream if it is capitalized. This regex is very careful to avoid capitalizing format specifiers, which is a lot of why it looks (and is, TBH) so hairy.

My regex doesn’t handle all the possible syntax surrounding format specifiers, because I don’t have 3 hours to spend enumerating and debugging each weird edge case, but it should be fine assuming that all the strings are values in dictionaries. The find-regex becomes the absolutely abhorrent (?-si)(?:"|(?<!%)%\d*[dsf]|(?!\A)\G)\K(?=[^"]*"\s*[,\]\}])((?:(?!(?:(?<!%)%\d*[dsf]|")).)*) in the case where the strings can be strings in arrays or values in dictionaries.

Test text:

{
    "a.b": "caps %02d %5s %d %03fnocaps %%02dcaps",
    "b.c.d": "%%caps %3sap %s cap"
}

Expected output:

{
    "a.b": "CAPS %02d %5s %d %03fNOCAPS %%02DCAPS",
    "B.C.D": "%%CAPS %3sAP %s CAP"
}

If you’re absolutely sure you want to capitalize everything that’s not a key, just use this much simpler regex-replace: "\s*:\s*"[^"]*"