Export all regular expression matches in Textpad or Notepad++ as a list

notepadregextextpad

In Textpad or Notepad++ is there an option to export all the matches for a regular expression find, as a single list?

In a big text file, I am searching for tags (words enclosed in % %), using regular expression %\< and \>%, and want all the matches as a single list, so that I can remove duplicates using Excel and get a list of unique tags.

Best Answer

You can achieve this by using Backreferences and Find and Mark functionality in Notepad++.

Find the matches using regex (say %(.*?)% ) and replace it by \n%\1%\n , after this we will have our target word in separate lines (i.e. no line will have more than one matched word)
Use the Search-->Find-->Mark functionality to mark each line with regex %(.*?)% and remember to tick 'Bookmark Line' before marking the text
Select Search-->Bookmark-->Remove Unmarked Lines
Save the remaining text. It is the required list.

Related Solutions

Regular expression replace in Textpad where search term spans multiple lines

Since Textpad seems to have only very limited regex support, I only got it done with three replaces:

Replace each newline (\n or \r\n) in your text with a unique pattern, e.g. ##NEWLINE##
Use the regex (Hello).*(World) and replace the match with \1 \2
(you can also just use Hello.*World and replace with Hello World)
Finally, revert step 1 by replacing all ##NEWLINE## with the actual newline

I suggest taking a look on Notepad++ which has better regex support, a lot of other features (especially for source code editing), and is open source / free software.

Invert regular expression match in TextMate

Not sure it will work with TextMate (I do not have it, but I've tested with Notepad++).

You could try:

\b(?:(?!goose)\w)+\b

Explanation:

\b          : word boundary
(?:         : start non capture group
  (?!goose) : negative lookahead, make sure we don't have the word "goose"
  \w        : a word character, you may use "[a-zA-Z]" for letters only or "." for any character but newline
)+          : group may appears 1 or more times
\b          : word boundary

Best Answer

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Regular expression replace in Textpad where search term spans multiple lines

Invert regular expression match in TextMate

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