Question

I have a part of HTML source file that contains strings that I want to select and copy at once, using the regex functionality of Notepad++.

Here is a part of the text source:

<option value="Performance"
>Performance</option>
<option value="Maintenance"
>Maintenance</option>
<option value="System Stability"
>System Stability</option>

I’m using the regex "[0-9a-zA-Z ]*" to search the “value” values. I have also selected the feature in Notepad++ search to highlight/mark the found text. This working fine I now want to copy or cut only the highlighted text to clipboard for further processing. But I’m not able to find this functionality in Notepad++. Is this simply not possible or am I too dumb?

Answer 1

Try this instead:

First, fix the line ending problem:
(Notepad++ doesn’t allow multi-line regular expressions)

Search [Extended Mode]: \r\n> (Or your own system’s line endings)

Replace: >

then

Search [Regex Mode]: <option[^>]+value="([^"]+)"[^>]*>.*

(if you want all occurences of value rather than just the options, simple remove the leading option)

Replace: \1

Explanation of the second regular expression:

<option[^>]+     Find a < followed by "option" followed by 
                 at least one character which is not a >

value="          Find the string value="

([^"]+)          Find one or more characters which are not a " and save them
                 to group \1

"[^>]*>.*        Find a " followed by zero or more non-'>' characters
                 followed by a > followed by zero or more characters.

Yes, it’s parsing HTML with a regex — these warnings apply — check the output carefully.