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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T19:49:38+00:00

I have a file with many rows. Each row has a column which may

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I have a file with many rows. Each row has a column which may contain comma separated values. I need each row to be distinct (ie no comma separated values).

Here is an example row:

AB  AB10,AB11,AB12,AB15,AB16,AB21,AB22,AB23,AB24,AB25,AB99  ABERDEEN    Aberdeenshire

The columns are comma separated (Postcode area, Postcode districts, Post town, Former postal county).

So the above row would get turned into:

AB  AB10    ABERDEEN    Aberdeenshire
AB  AB11    ABERDEEN    Aberdeenshire
AB  AB12    ABERDEEN    Aberdeenshire
...
...

I tried the following but it didn’t work…

(.+)\t(([0-9A-Z]+),)+\t(.+)\t(.+)
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I agree that RegEx are not be the best way but this should work hopefully if that’s all you have available to you. (Done repeatedly until there are no more matches)

    Edit

    Updated with the OP’s final solution from the comments.

    Find: (.+)\t([^,\s]+),([^\t]+)\t(.+)
Replace: \1\t\2\t\4\r\1\t\3\t\4
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