18
6
I am trying to move away from TextPad, and I just can't get regular expressions like ^ and $ to be replaced. I have definitely ticked the regular expression box.
What am I doing wrong?
I am trying to find the start of a new line. In TextPad, it is find '^' and ensure regular expressions is enabled. With Notepad++ it does not do that. It just says "Not found".
Jack Kada
Posted 2010-05-27T13:58:45.893
Reputation: 777
26
^ and $ are both anchors in Regex, which means if you want to replace the literal chars ^ and $ you need to escape them, usually with a leading backslash (\^, and \$).
To find the first character on a line use ^.
The start line anchor (^) is a zero-width match, so combining it with the . will find any character at the beginning of a line.
Maybe you can explain what you're actually trying to do?
John Weldon
Posted 2010-05-27T13:58:45.893
Reputation: 1 411
8
Because these are special characters that represent the front (^) and end of line ($). Try escaping them with a \.
Examples:
Match "Cat" at the beginning of the line:
^Cat
Match "Cat" at the end of line:
Cat$
Match "Cat" as only thing on a line:
^Cat$
Match a "$100" within a line:
\$100
Here is a link for the specifics on regular expression matching within Notepad++.
RC.
Posted 2010-05-27T13:58:45.893
Reputation: 211
2The link seems to be (effectively) broken. – Peter Mortensen – 2012-11-01T01:50:24.257
6
I've had the same issue myself. After some trial and error you can achieve the same by doing the following:
Find: ^(.)
Replace: [the string you wish you insert]\1
What this will do is locate and tag the first character of the line, put in the new string and put the tagged character after it.
For example, I needed to insert a single quote at the start of each line:
Find: ^(.)
Replace: '\1
You can do the same for the end of the line by doing:
Find: (.)$
Replace: \1*[the string you wish to append]*
Willy
Posted 2010-05-27T13:58:45.893
Reputation: 61
1
I got it.
Before
After
Remove after character or text
@(.*)$
Remove before character or text
^(.*)@
dot = any character
asterisk = zero or more times
ezequias
Posted 2010-05-27T13:58:45.893
Reputation: 19
1
Here is how to do it...
Before:
$_GET['id']; $_GET['nick'];
After:
htmlentities($_GET['id']); htmlentities($_GET['nick']);
So. On the find field put:
$_GET(.*])
On the replace field put:
htmlentities($_GET\1)
Lue
Posted 2010-05-27T13:58:45.893
Reputation: 11
0
The issue seems to have been fixed now.
In Notepad++ v6.9.2 (running under Windows 7) I get both ^ (start of line) and $ (end of line) to work.
Elias Mossholm
Posted 2010-05-27T13:58:45.893
Reputation: 33
Why exactly are you trying to find the start of a new line? Do you want to add something at the beginning of every line? That would help us actually answer the question. If you are using Notepad++ in order to move away from a paid solution, you will have to learn its quirks and work around them. I have had no problem doing this, since Notepad++ is very good in so many other ways. – Joshua Nurczyk – 2016-04-20T06:48:10.260
I've used TextPad and found this same issue to be annoying (to put it mildly). Basically, Npp's Regex functionality is stunted when comared to most other Regex-s. This stems from the fact that Npp is an abstraction of the Scintilla Editor which uses a single-line-based RegEx :( -- The Npp crew are quite well aware of this issue, but it has (oddly) been on the back-burner (a time and resources issue). $ does work, but they haven't got ^ to work multi-line (yet). I know this limitation, and work with (and aroud it). As mentioned below ^(.) works. (Rarely, I revert to TPad or UltraEdit) – Peter.O – 2010-08-05T23:59:10.110
1PS. you can often use Extended (vs RegEx ) as a workaround for \r and \n - this semi-mimics a start-of-line. Also, as a by-the-way, you can stay in Normal search and turn on View -- Show Symbol -- Show End of Line.. Although they don't (visually) appear in the Find-field, if you select CRLF first, the Find-field auto-prime kicks in when you press CTRL+F, and it quite happily becomes a multi-line (but not RegEx) search. Its not much different to Extended search, but I found it to be interesting, and some readers may also find it so. (I love Npp :) – Peter.O – 2010-08-06T00:21:55.053