Replace a specific char with the begining of the line

Axel Blitz

Hi friends, I hope you can help me please

i have a text file formatted like this :

Cell1-value1++value2++value3++value4…
Cell2-valuea++valueb++valuec++valued…
…
Cell1213…
Cell1214…

What I want to do is to insert the Cell number between the double +

Cell1-value1+Cell1+value2+Cell1+value3+Cell1+value4…
Cell2-valuea+Cell2+valueb+Cell2+valuec+Cell2+valued…

I tried with regex but didn’t find out how to solve this.

Thank you for your help

PeterJones

@Axel-Blitz said in Replace a specific char with the begining of the line:

Cell1-value1++value2++value3++value4…
Cell2-valuea++valueb++valuec++valued…

FIND = ^(\w+).*?\K\+\+
REPLACE = +$1+
SEARCH MODE = Regular Expression
REPLACE ALL

Will replace the first ++ on each line with the cell value. Clicking Replace All N times (where N is the maximum number of ++ on any of the thousands of lines in your file – or just stop clicking when the Replace dialog says “0 occurrences were replaced in entire file”) will propagate it to the very end.

Quick explanation:

^ = start match at beginning of line
(\w+) = grab as many word characters (A-Z, 0-9, _) and store in group#1
.*? = move forward on the line until whatever comes next in the regex is matched (this is a way to skip 0 or more characters, when you don’t know how many characters it will be)
\K = this is a fancy thing that says “do all the matching before this symbol, but don’t include the text before this when i do a replacement later” – or, essentially, “keep (hence the \K) the text that comes before this”
\+\+ = match two literal + signs (+ is special to regex, so need a \ before it)
REPLACE: +$1+ => replace just the two + from the match with a single + then the contents of group 1 then a single + .

(Sorry that you might have to hit Replace All multiple times. it might be possible to do with a very complicated single regular expression even if we cannot guarantee how many ++ there are beforehand, but it’s much easier to explain one where you just replace one ++ per line at a time. With a file with 1000 or 10000 lines, if you only have 10 ++ per line, so it grows with the number of ++ not with the number of lines, so there is at least that. And honestly, if you had more than 10 in a given row, the regex would be too complicated to type and use, so hitting 10 Replace All seems doable. If you might have 100 ++ on a single line, then I suggest recording the replacement I showed as a macro, then use Macro > Run a Macro Multiple Times to specify that you want to run the replacement 100 times without having to do 100 clicks.)

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Axel Blitz

@PeterJones said in Replace a specific char with the begining of the line:

Peter Jones you saved my day !!
Thank you very much <3