Regular expressions in notepad++ (Search and Replace)

Question

I have a list of thousands of records within a .txt document. some of them look like these records

201910031044         "00059"    "11.31AG"  "Senior Champion"
201910031044         "00060"    "GBA146"  "Junior Champion"
201910031044         "00999"    "10.12G"  "ProAM"
201910031044         "00362"    "113.1LI"  "Abcd"

Whenever a record similar to this occurs I'd like to get rid of the last words/numbers/etc in the last quotation marks (like "Senior Champion", "Junior Champion" etc. There are many possibilities here)

e.g. (before)

201910031044         "00059"    "11.31AG"  "Senior Champion"

after

201910031044         "00059"    "11.31AG"

I tried the following regex but it wouldn't work.

Search: ^([0-9]{17,17} + "[0-9]{8,8}" + "[a-zA-Z0-9]").*$

Replace: \1 (replace string)

OK I forgot the . (dot) sign however even if I do not have a . (dot) sign it would not work. Not sure if it has anything to do when using the + sign used more than once.

Answer 1

I'd like to get rid of the last words/numbers/etc in the last quotation marks

This does the job:

• Ctrl+H
• Find what: ^.+\K\h+".*?"$
• Replace with: LEAVE EMPTY
• CHECK Wrap around
• CHECK Regular expression
• UNCHECK . matches newline*
• Replace all

Explanation:

^           # beginning of line
  .+        # 1 or more any character but newline
  \K        # forget all we have seen until this position
  \h+       # 1 or more horizontal spaces
  ".*?"     # something inside quotes
$           # end of line

Screen capture (before):

Screen capture (after):

Answer 2

The RegEx looks for the 4th double quote:

^(?:[^"]*\"){4}([^|]*)

You can see this demo: https://regex101.com/r/wJ9yS6/163

You will still need to parse the lines, so probably easier opening in excel or parsing using code as a CSV.

Answer 3

You have a problem with the count of your characters:

• you specify that the line should start with exactly 17 digits ([0-9]{17,17}). However, there are only 12 digits in the data 201910031044.
  • you can specify exactly 12 digits by using {12} or if it could be 12-17, then {12,17}. I'll assume exactly 12 based on the current data.
• similarly, for the second column you specify that it's exactly 8 digits surrounded by quotes ("[0-9]{8,8}") but it only has 5 digits surrounded by quotes.
  • again, you can specify exactly 5 with {5} or 5-8 with {5,8}. I will assume exactly 5.
• finally, there is no quantifier for the final field, so the regex tries to match exactly one character that is a letter or a number surrounded by quotes "[a-zA-Z0-9]".
  • I'm not sure if there is any limit on the number of characters, so I would go with one or more using + as quantifier "[a-zA-Z0-9]+" - if you can have zero or more, then you can use *, or if it's any other count from m to n, then you can use {m,n} as before.

Not a character count problem but the final column can also have dots but the regex doesn't account for. You can just add . inside the square brackets and it will only match dot characters. It's usually used as a wildcard but it loses its special meaning inside a character class ([]), so you get "[a-zA-Z0-9.]+"

Putting it all together, you get

Search: ^([0-9]{12} + "[0-9]{5}" + "[a-zA-Z0-9.]+").*$
Replace: \1

Which will get rid of anything after the third field in Notepad++.

This can be shortened a bit by using \d instead of [0-9] for digits and \s+ for whitespace instead of +. As a benefit, \s will also match other whitespace like tabs, so you don't have to manually account for those. This leads to

Search: ^(\d{12}\s+"\d{5}"\s+"[a-zA-Z0-9.]+").*$
Replace: \1

Answer 4

If you want to get rid of the last words/numbers/etc in the last quotation marks you could capture in a group what is before that and match the last quotation marks and everything between it to remove it using a negated character class.

If what is between the values can be spaces or tabs, you could use [ \t]+ to match those (using \s could also match a newline)

Note that {17,17} and {8,8} may also be written as {17} and {8} which in this case should be {12} and {5}

^([0-9]{12}[ \t]+"[0-9]{5}"[ \t]+"[a-zA-Z0-9.]+")[ \t]{2,}"[^"\r\n]+"

In parts

• ^ Start of string
• ( Capture group 1
  • [0-9]{12}[ \t]+ Match 12 digits and 1+ spaces or tabs
  • "[0-9]{5}"[ \t]+ Match 5 digits between " and 1+ spaces or tabs
  • "[a-zA-Z0-9.]+" Match 1+ times any of the listed between "
• ) Close group
• [ \t]{2,} Match 1+ times
• "[^"\r\n]+"

In the replacement use group 1 $1

Regex demo

Before

After