Question

What regular expression is used to delete everything except the first word from each line:

Data:

JAMES          3.318  3.318      1
JOHN           3.271  6.589      2
ROBERT         3.143  9.732      3

I’m trying to do this in Notepad++ as a replace.

Answer 1

Depends on what regex implementation you’re using.

the regex ^[A-Za-z_]+ will capture the first word on a line. So, you can capture this first word and print it out and you’re good to go, if your implementation permits.

If you need to use substitute, you can substitute ^([A-Za-z_]+).* for \1
E.g., in vi, you would use the command :%s/^\([A-Za-z_]+\).*/\1/