TextPad Find Replace Commands Wild Cards

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I am trying to figure out how I can put together a find and replace command with wildcards or figure out a way to find and replace the following example:

I would like to find terms that contain double quotes in front of them with a single quote at the end:

Example:
find "joe' and replace with 'joe'

Basically, I'm trying to find all terms with terms having "in front and at the end.'

Best Answer

Check the [x] Regular expression checkbox in textpad's replace dialog and enter the following values:

Find what:

"([^'"]*)'

Replace with:

'\1'

Explanation:

In a regular expression, square brackets are used to indicate character classes. A character class beginning with a caret will match anything not in the class.
Thus [^'"] will match any character except ' and ". The following * indicates that any number of these characters can follow. The ( and ) mark a group. And the group we're looking for starts with " and ends with '. Finally in the replace string we can refer to any group via \n where n is the nth group. In our case it is the first and only group and that is why we used \1.

Related Solutions

R – Why would Textpad ask if you want to use POSIX regular expression syntax

The POSIX alternative is as opposed to the TextPad default. From the Search/Replace help doc:

TextPad's regular expressions are based on POSIX standard P1003.2, but the syntax can be that of POSIX, or UNIX extended regular expressions (the default).

to get the job done in TextPad, use the following:

Find in: ^[^"]*"\([^"]*\)"
Replace with: \1

edit:

to break the expression down:

^ - start of line
[^"]* - in a set the caret ^ is for negation, 
        so a greedy match of anything that is not a "
        in this case, everything up to the first quote
" - the first quote per line in your source text
\(...\) - puts together a group that can be referenced later
[^"]* - same explanation as above, this time matching the url in question
" - the last quote on the line

Also, looking through the help doc on Regex in TextPad, there is a chart of legal expressions listing both the 'Default' and the 'POSIX' versions side by side. The only difference seems to be the escaping of the Grouping parens () and the Occurance curlies {} in the Default and the lack of escaping in the POSIX version.

With that in mind, to get the job done in TextPad with the 'use POSIX regular expression syntax' option checked, swap out the above 'Find in' expression with the following:

Find in: ^[^"]*"([^"]*)"

Find and replace end of line with “\n” verbatim

In the notepad++ search & replace dialog (Ctrl-H), go into "Extended" mode.

From there, replacing \r\n with \\n should do it - if I understand your question correctly.

For instance, I typed in...

something
something else
blah

... and then did the above with "Replace All", which left me with:

something\nsomething else\nblah

Best Answer

Related Solutions

R – Why would Textpad ask if you want to use POSIX regular expression syntax

Find and replace end of line with “\n” verbatim

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