In the future, please do not delete posts that have replies. And if you want to clarify, provide more details, etc, you can just do that in a reply, so that the conversation keeps the original context.

To preserve the history of this discussion, the first post has been un-deleted. But since the conversation has moved forward in the new Topic, this old version has been locked.

I’m writing my response on my phone, so I prefer brevity. That said, my new regex uses lookahead and lookbehind. Google those terms for some guidance.

I tested the solution but it is not working. Zero replacements.

But i forgot to mention that in the last field before \r\n there can be several \n characters in the tekst string.
In that memo field people entered some tekst or uploaded e-mails etc… So the format is unpredictable. The record should be seen as one line that ends with carriage return linefeed.

I would suggest looking at @Bas-de-Reuver ’s CSVLint plugin for working with CSV files. I don’t know enough about it to say whether it can solve your problem, but I can say that working in CSV files with regular expressions is error-prone.

My own Columns++ plugin can convert CSV to tab-separated values and back again; tab-separated values are less problematic to search and manipulate than delimiter-separated values. However, I suggest CSVLint first, if it can do what you need.

First, @mike-albers, I advice you to backup your file BEFORE trying my S/R :

If we assume that your last field does not contain any ; nor \r, nor \n within the first 4,000 characters,

I would simplify the problem, using this regex S/R :

• FIND ([^;\r\n]{4000})(?s).+$

• REPLACE $1

So, for each record :

• Any character placed in the last field, under 4,001, will be kept

• Any character placed in the last field, over 4,000, will be deleted !

Best Regards,

guy038

Hi Mark,

I tested the solution but it is not working. Zero replacements.

But i forgot to mention that in the last field before \r\n there can be several \n characters in the tekst string.
In that memo field people entered some tekst or uploaded e-mails etc… So the format is unpredictable. The record should be seen as one line that ends with carriage return linefeed.
That omission on my part might be why it is not working…

I also tried to put all the records on their own line by doing the following search/replace first;
\n := \t\n wich resulted in \t\n in the memo field ending with \r\t\n.
then
\r\t\n := \r\n
then
\t\n := \t
After which all the fields were in their own single line.

Then applied your solution again, but also zero replacements.

Since i cannot fully comprehend what you gave me, i don’t get it.

My workaround could be to truncate every line at the 4000th character, but i really try to keep all (up to 4000) characters in that last memo field.

Hope it can be solved.
Thanks,
Mike

Thank you i will try it out but i am trying to understand the solution too. Can you please explain it a bit?
As far as i understand you do a search with negative on carriage return linefeed and then a semicolon. But how will that find the last semicolon? And how will it find the following string with a maximum of 4000 characters even when it can be far less or bigger then 4000. Or does a negative search mean that it goes backwards from the end.
Want to learn from your solution. Not copy/paste it like a monkey. :-)