Question

I have a huge text file ( 375K lines ). All I want is the first column of the text file. I am using notepad++. How can I remove everything except that first column?

Deleting using column select is impossible in such file. I think regex can help me or may be some plugin.

Edit
@Bolt: Column: Consider this as first 12 characters or [space] then numbers then [space]

Answer 1

Search for

^(............).*

and replace with \1

Turn on regular expression mode.

^ match the start of the row

(............) matches 12 characters (no matter what) and stores it in \1

.* matches everything else in the row that will be removed.