Find and replace except if string contains charecter

[Pinto Islam]

I have many documents where I need to “fix” html codes.

When the files were created, some were create using POST[variable] and some were created POST[“variable”'] tags.

I need to convert the POST[variable] tags with POST[“variable”] to standardize the documents and leave the POST[“variable”] tags alone

If I use RegEx POST[(.+)] it finds all instances of POST[] entries (ones without the double quotes and ones withe the double quotes.

Is there a RegEx that will tell it to only find the POST[variable] and to ignore the ones with POST[“variable”]?

Hope this makes sense and someone can assist.
Thanks in advance.

[Coises]

@Pinto-Islam said in Find and replace except if string contains charecter:

I need to convert the POST[variable] tags with POST[“variable”] to standardize the documents and leave the POST[“variable”] tags alone

If I use RegEx POST[(.+)] it finds all instances of POST[] entries (ones without the double quotes and ones withe the double quotes.

Try:
Find what : POST\[([^"\]]++)\]
Replace with : POST["\1"]

[Mark Olson]

Coises’ proposal should work.

If his solution isn’t quite what you’re looking for, I would probably start by amending the Find what to
POST\s*\[\s*([^\s\]'"]+)\s*\]
and leave the Replace with as is.
Mine is a bit more resilient to corner cases and converts

POST [ foo ]
POST[bar]
POST [
   baz_quz
]
POST [$f89 ]
POST["bar"]
POST [ "foo" ]
POST[ 'bar' ]

to

POST["foo"]
POST["bar"]
POST["baz_quz"]
POST["$f89"]
POST["bar"]
POST [ "foo" ]
POST[ 'bar' ]

[PeterJones]

This post is deleted!

[Pinto Islam]

@Coises
This worked perfect. After I posted, I was doing similar steps, but turns out I put the () in the wrong place and wasn’t getting the right result. Appreciate your help.