find and replacenotepadregex
I have a SQL dump with expressions such as youtubehd:2nj6bykw. The 2nj6bykw can also be a different random string. It is always 8 characters long.
I want to replace youtubehd:2nj6bykw with just youtubehd.
How can I do this without replacing it manually, one by one? The SQL dump is over 230000 lines long and has about 200 occurrences of these strings.
I suppose I need a wildcard, but I have no clue about what it is and how I can do this.
Instructions
Open Notepad++ and press
Ctrl+Fand then from theFind in Filestab options.Now you'll...
Put the string in the regex format of the Find What:
^.*(PeopleSleptWith).*$
- The string will go between the "
()" parenthesis just as shown above in#1Put the 5 spaces and then the Replace with:
PeopleSleptWith 7string- Put the Filters: as
*.*or*.txtor whatever you are replacing file type wise- Put the Directory: where you want it to be (the root folder)
- Check the
Regular expressionoption- Select
Replace in FilesCheck the file(s) and all should be correct now
^.+?((?:\d+\.){3}\d+).+$$1. matches newlineExplanation:
^ : beginning of line
.+? : 1 or more any character but newline
( : start group 1
(?: : start non capture group
\d+ : 1 or more digit
\. : a dot
){3} : end group, must appear 3 times
\d+ : 1 or more digit
) : end group 1
.+ : 1 or more any character but newline
$ : end of line
Replacement:
$1 : content of group 1 (ie. the IP)
Result for given example:
54.246.81.158
175.36.129.24
To be sure you have an IP address, use
((?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?\.){3}(?:(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)))
instead of
((?:\d+\.){3}\d+)
Best Answer
Please make sure you have a backup in case something goes wrong.
youtubehd:\w\w\w\w\w\w\w\wyoutubehdThanks to KCotreau for pointing out that search mode defaults to Normal and needs to be changed.
Edit:
It's been pointed out in the comments below that you could instead use
youtubehd:\w{8}as your search pattern. This is correct and indeed preferable. Support for this was only added in Notepad++ v6 though which came out after this was originally written hence the reason why I used the longer form. See here for more.