Search and Replace Question - Need help fixing a file

Almighty1

Fellow Notepad++ Users,

Could you please help me the the following search-and-replace problem I am having?

I have a .xml file and basically I want to get the <setting> in the right place.

Here is the data I currently have (“before” data):

<settings><setting name="ReleaseChannel">2</setting><setting
name="AllowOnlyOneInstance">1</setting><setting name="CloseOnEscape">0</setting><setting
name="DbgHelpSearchPath">SRV*C:\Symbols*https://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols</setting><setting
name="DbgHelpUndecorate">1</setting><setting name="DisabledPlugins"></setting><setting
name="ElevationLevel">1</setting><setting name="EnableAdvancedOptions">1</setting><setting
name="EnableAvxSupport">0</setting><setting name="EnableBitmapSupport">1</setting><setting
name="EnableArmCycleCpuUsage">0</setting></settings>

Here is how I would like that data to look (“after” data):

<settings>
<setting name="ReleaseChannel">2</setting>
<setting name="AllowOnlyOneInstance">1</setting>
<setting name="CloseOnEscape">0</setting>
<setting name="DbgHelpSearchPath">SRV*C:\Symbols*https://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols</setting>
<setting name="DbgHelpUndecorate">1</setting>
<setting name="DisabledPlugins"></setting>
<setting name="ElevationLevel">1</setting>
<setting name="EnableAdvancedOptions">1</setting>
<setting name="EnableAvxSupport">0</setting>
<setting name="EnableBitmapSupport">1</setting>
<setting name="EnableArmCycleCpuUsage">0</setting>
</settings>

IF THERE IS SOMETHING THAT DOES NOT GET EXPRESSED WELL
BY PASTING YOUR EXAMPLE TEXT BETWEEN THE ``` LINES ABOVE,
PLEASE MAKE A SCREENSHOT OF YOUR NOTEPAD++ WINDOW AND
PASTE IT HERE. BUT A PICTURE SHOULD ONLY ACCOMPANY
YOUR EXAMPLE TEXT, YOU SHOULDN’T USE THE PICTURE IN
PLACE OF YOUR EXAMPLE TEXT.

To accomplish this, I have tried using the following Find/Replace expressions and settings

Find What = SEARCH EXPRESSION HERE
Replace With = REPLACEMENT EXPRESSION HERE
Search Mode = REGULAR EXPRESSION or NORMAL or EXTENDED
Dot Matches Newline = CHECKED or NOT CHECKED

HERE IS WHY YOU THOUGHT YOUR EXPRESSION WOULD WORK

Unfortunately, this did not produce the output I desired, and I’m not sure why. Could you please help me understand what went wrong and help me find the solution?

PeterJones

@Almighty1 ,

Thanks for using the search/replace template (though you didn’t need to leave the “IF THERE IS SOMETHING…” text; sorry that wasn’t more obvious … and actually showing what you tried, rather than leaving the default prompts, would have been good)

This isn’t hard with regular expressions (regex) and learning a few of the simple special-sequences in regex (each of which I briefly explain below):

Search > Replace
Find What: ><setting\s+
- \s+ says look for one or more space, tab, or newline characters, thus allowing you to capture the line-wrap that appears in your example data
Replace With: >\r\n<setting\x20
- \r\n says “put a newline in the replacement”
- the \x20 at the end is just an alternate encoding for the space character, which I used because it’s easier to notice during copy/paste from the forum than if I’d said “there’s a space at the end of the replacement regex, which you cannot easily copy”
  - by replacing the space(s)/newlines from the FIND with a single space character, it will merge the <setting back to the same line as the name="...
Search Mode: Regular Expression
Replace All

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Useful References

Almighty1

@PeterJones - Thanks for the assistance!

You are right, some of the parts are obvious but I didn’t want to mess up the template by deleting things that don’t apply in case it is needed to produce the correct output in the post itself. Same reason, I didn’t delete the “To accomplish this,” section because while I knew from searching that \r\n meant carriage return, in the before data, I wasn’t sure what to use because as you can see, I knew one had to look for "<setting " but then I looked at it and noticed that there are two versions of "<setting ", one being "<setting " with the second one being “<setting name=”, and obviously, nothing needed to be done for “<setting name=” so my thought was I thought, I needed to make it ignore the “<setting name=” lines as part of the find which was really what made it more difficult in the search part.