Saturday 9 November 2013

Using Regular expressions in notepad++

--Using Regular expressions  in a practical life --

Hey Guys, Today i was writing a post & come with a particular problem. The problem was , I was writing 108 names of God Surya. I wrote them one by one in every new line in notepad. Later I thought I forgot to add OM as a prefix to each name. Now what to do? I can not type  each name & add one by one.

So for that I thought to use techniques of regular expression & add them in intelligent way. So what I did was, I opened that file into Notepad++ .
Then pressed Ctrl+H to open find & replace box . At the search mode, i selected the option "Regular Expression" .

Now at "Find what" box - I typed "^"  ==>This indicates beginning of each line 
and at "Replace with box" - I typed  "OM ". Finally I clicked on Replace all. 

That's it.  In one shot, i did my whole changes.  Wow it was fantastic.

Similarly,  if you have text like
word1
word2
word3

and  you wanted to make  some thing like -
test: "word1"
test: "word2"
test: "word3"

All you need to do is 
Search = ^([a-Za-z0-9]+)$
Replace= test:"\1"


This is just a very simple example of using regular expression in notepad++. You can do much better things  related to matching & replacing various types of patterns by using regular expressions.

Happy Learning.. ..!!





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