BRETT BATIE

Editplus is definitely my favorite text editor but it does not entirely support Regular Expression. Below is an example of when Editplus has failed me:

So, I used the regular expression .*<table.*\n.*<tr>\n.*<td>. This unexpectedly returned everything from the beginning of the file down to the <td>. Basically it seems to have a little bit of trouble with multi-line regular expressions.

My solution to this problem was to develop a little regular expression command line program and add it as an Editplus user tool. An added benefit to creating this application is I can now do Regular Expression search and replace via the command line. At the time of creating this application I did not know about Powershell as that would have provided the same functionality. But this little application works so I will stick with it for now.

So, how does the search and replace program work? If you type SearchReplace.exe at the command line you will get the following:

Usage: searchReplace.exe "regular expression" "replacement string" file.txt

Pretty simple ehh?  Note: if you happen to have double quotes in your regular expression they will need to be escaped.

Now to set this up with Editplus just go to Tool —> Preferences —> User Tools and put in the following values:

Command: SearchReplace.exe
Argument: "$(Prompt)" "$(Prompt)" $(FileName)
Initial: $(FileDir)
Check: Run as text filter

When this user tool is run the first pop up box will be where you put the regular expression and the second will be the replacement string.

At this point I have to give a little warning that I have not thoroughly tested this program and I am not liable for any data loss caused by this program. If you happen to encounter any problems let me know. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 14th, 2006 at 10:53 pm and is filed under Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.