Question

I’ve a collection of strings like that (each “space” is a tabulation):

29  301 3   31  0       TREZILIDE       Trézilidé
2A  001 1   73  1   (LE)    AFA (Le)    Afa

What I want is to transform it into this:

29301 Trézilidé
2A001 (Le) Afa

• Suppression of the first tabulation
• suppression of the tabulations, numbers and the first uppercase occurrence (and replacement of the whole stuff by a space)
• replacement of the last tabulation by a space

My bigger problems are:

• How to select the first tabulation without selecting the “prefix” and the “suffix”? (like ^(..)\t[0-9] but without selecting ^(..) nor [0-9])
• How to select from after the 3 digits to after the tabulation of the uppercase word?

I do that in a text file with the search and replace toolbox of Notepad++

Thanks in advance for your help!

Answer 1

How to select the first tabulation without selecting the “prefix” and the “suffix”?

Optimally this is done using lookahead and lookbehind assertions, but Notepad++ doesn’t support those before version 6.0. The next best solution is to just capture them, then backreference them in the replacement string.

Here’s how I did it (in answer to your full question):

1. Check Match case to do a case-sensitive find

2. Find by regex:

   ^(..)\t(\d\d\d)[\tA-Z0-9()]+\t(.+)$
   

   Replace with:

   \1\2 \3
   

   I end up with this, where <tab> represents an actual tabulation:

   29301 Trézilidé
   2A001 (Le)<tab>Afa
   

3. To get rid of that I do an extended find:

   \t
   

   And replace it with the space character, to obtain the final result:

   29301 Trézilidé
   2A001 (Le) Afa