Question

I have a CSV I’m trying to format, but the input data has lots of commas to begin with. It would be much easier if I could simply replace all commas on a given line (AFTER the 4th) with a semicolon.

Is there anyway to do this using a simple find/replace regex, or is programming required?

Answer 1

The easiest way (since Notepad++’s regexes don’t support variable-length lookbehind assertions) to tackle this is probably to do it in three steps:

First, change the first four commas into something unique: Search for

^([^,]*),([^,]*),([^,]*),([^,]*), 

and replace with \1#COMMA#\2#COMMA#\3#COMMA#\4#COMMA#.

Then, replace all commas with semicolons.

Lastly, replace all #COMMA#s with commas.

This assumes that all lines with commas do have at least four of them.