Efficiently select/copy bookmarked lines and their collapsed contents altogether?

Fermi

I have bunch of sections and collapsed contents (ie. .ini format) shown.

I’ve identified the keyword of interest (ie. “positive” in this case) by Bookmark line" & “Mark All”) and would like to select/copy both the bookmarked lines and their content collapsed in the bookmarked lines (ie. line 1-3, 4-6, 10-12).

How can I select/copy both bookmarked and collapsed lines within more efficiently, without actually unfolding, for example, the section 1 to select line 2-3?

I’ve hovered Ctrl + mouse manually from the beginning of the bookmarker lines of interest for line selection. Can Notepad++ select/copy the lines in the bookmarked/collapsed easily?

Thanks for comments.

Alan Kilborn

@Fermi

So, the following has nothing to do with bookmarks at all…

But if you put your caret at the beginning of line 4 and press Shift + DownArrow, line 4 will appear selected and your caret will be at the start of line 7. If you then press Ctrl+c, the text copied will include lines 4, 5 and 6.

If you’re looking for more “advanced” functionality than that, you’re out of luck.

mkupper

@Fermi If your data closely matches the layout that you showin your screen shots then try this:

Step 1 - add one line at the bottom of the file that has

[section999, end]

The exact details of that line do not matter other than we want the [section999 part.

Step 2 - Do a Mark-all using this regular expression

^(\[section[0-9]+, positive\]\R(?:(?!\[section[0-9]+).+\R)*)+

If you experiment with searching using that expression you will find that it matches blocks of consecutive positive sections. The reason for the [section999, end] line is to deal with if the last section is positive and there is stuff after that section that you don’t want.

If you don’t have stuff in the file after the last section then you don’t need the [section999, end] line.

If you have blank lines in your sections then change the (?!\[section[0-9]+).+ part to (?!\[section[0-9]+).* As it is, if you have no blank lines then you can use .+ and instead of an [section999, end] line you can add one blank line.

Step 3 - Do a mark-all and then Copy-all-marked lines.

That will load all of the positive sections into the copy/ paste buffer in one shot.

Here’s the breakdown of what’s happening in

^(\[section[0-9]+, positive\]\R(?:(?!\[section[0-9]+).+\R)*)+

The outer ^( … )+ parentheses allow for consectitive positive blocks. This is optional as we are doing a mark-all Having this makes a plain search to see what it makes make more sense.
The \[section[0-9]+, positive\]\R part matches the start of a positive section.
Right after that is (?:(?!\[section[0-9]+).*\R)* which matches zero or more lines within a section with the end of the match being the start of the next section. Essentially, I’m matching all lines that do not start with \[section[0-9]+. If your data includes lines that start with something line [section999 then you may need to expand that part of the regexp.

Fermi

This post is deleted!

mkupper

@Fermi said in Efficiently select/copy bookmarked lines and their collapsed contents altogether?:

I guess I’ve over-simplified the problem earlier. I’m having something more general like: [long_random_stringx_sectiony, positive, long_random_stringy] as the section header.

Please take a look at FAQ: Request for Help without sufficient information to help you. I think that will help you ask a question here where the answers you get will be useful or helpful to you.

Fermi

@mkupper
In a generic form (.ini), I want to select the header and its contents, where the header/comment before/after the keyword (ie. positive) are unique.

[unique_header1]; positive, unique_comment1
aaa
...
[unique_header2]; negative, unique_comment2
bbb
...
[unique_header3]; positive, unique_comment3
ccc
...
[unique_headerz]; positive, unique_commentz
zzz
...

What modification should I have to the regex? Thanks.