Notepad++ and Regular Expressions

Notepad++ had been one of my favorite tool for writing scripts, editing and formatting. Regular expression support that has makes it very powerful tool in analyzing logs, by searching/replacing patters.

1.String that contains a pattern
     abc.*  matches with abc, abcd, abc pqr,See the highlighted text below.


2. Line starting with a string

^abc.* matches with the lines that starts with abc.* . See the highlighted test below.

3. Lines that ends with a particular pattern
abcd$ matches with all the lines that ends with abcd as shown below.

4. Lines that starts and ends with a particular pattern

(a)   ^abcd$ matches with all the lines that has only abcd in it.

(b)  ^a.*g$  matches with all the line that starts with a and ends with g.

 5. Patters with a character that can occur more than once in a pattern
     a+ matches with all the occurrence of a as shown below.

6. Lines that doesn't have a pattern
    Here is an example of searching for a line that doesn't have  apostrophe ( ' ) in it.
    ^(?!.*').*$

7. (Below is the example that shows the search of lines with apostrophe
^.*'.*$

)






8. ^(?!.*(hello)).*$  This selects lines that doesn't have "hello" in it.



9. Replacing all comments starting with // with /* */
Find what: ^\/\/(.*)$
Replace with: /*$1*/

10. Swapping two sides of =
Find what: ^(.*)=(.*)$
Replace with: $2=$1