Question

Problem – Multiline, Semi-colon delimited file has been split at column 79 or 80 (not always the same for some strange reason).

It seems to me that a Regex would be the appropriate solution, so now I have two problems.

Lines are:

1sdf.............................mno[cr][lf]
pqr........xyz......................[cr][lf]
.....|.....|.....|.....|.....|.....|[cr][lf]
2sdf.............................mno[cr][lf]
pqr........xyz......................[cr][lf]
.....|.....|.....|.....|.....|.....|[cr][lf]
3sdf.............................mno[cr][lf]
pqr........xyz......................[cr][lf]
.....|.....|.....|.....|.....|.....|[cr][lf]
4sdf.............................mno[cr][lf]
pqr........xyz......................[cr][lf]
.....|.....|.....|.....|.....|.....|[cr][lf]
... 10000 rows ...

Where the pipe is a non-space whitespace character (possibly a tab)

I need:

1sdf.............................mnopqr........xyz......................[cr][lf]
2sdf.............................mnopqr........xyz......................[cr][lf]
3sdf.............................mnopqr........xyz......................[cr][lf]
4sdf.............................mnopqr........xyz......................[cr][lf]

I managed to get the job done with

Pass 1:
Replace ^\s*\r\n with \rxxx\n

// Replace Blank lines with \rxxx\n leaving

1sdf.............................mno[cr][lf]
pqr........xyz......................[cr][lf]
[cr]xxx[lf]
2sdf.............................mno[cr][lf]
pqr........xyz......................[cr][lf]

Pass 2:
Replace \r\n with [empty]
//leaving:

1sdf.............................mnopqr........xyz......................[cr]
xxx[lf]
2sdf.............................mnopqr........xyz......................

Pass 3:
Replace \rxxx\n with \r\n

//leaving:

1sdf.............................mnopqr........xyz......................[cr][lf]
2sdf.............................mnopqr........xyz......................

And the rest of the cleanup is trivial.

Is there any way of doing this in a single step? The output is from a common financial application, and I’d rather be able to fix the files myself rather than try and get many multiple clients to adjust their output.

Answer 1

In Notepad++ (using regular expression mode) you can use this:

Find what: \r\n(\s*\r\n)?

Replace with: \1

Then run “Replace All” exactly once. However, make sure you update to Notepad++ 6! Otherwise matching \r\n with a regular expression won’t work in Notepad++.