DELETE EVERYTHING BUT

[martib]

Hallo,

I have a huge file and i want to delete all lines which
do not start with: a href="http://www.

Any idea how to do that?

[Bob Hansen]

1. Mark all lines that begin with "a href.......
Find: ^a href="http://www\..*
(Regular Expressions, POSIX syntax)

2. Toggle bookmarked lines
Search/Invert all bookmarks

3. Delete bookmarked lines
Edit/Delete/Bookmarked lines

========================================
Edited note, as caught by MudGuard:
The solution provided above will work in TextPad, not in WildEdit.
I did not notice that the question was in the WildEdit forum.
Sorry about that. Thanks MudGuard.
See his WildEdit solution that follows.......

[MudGuard]

Bob, your solution would be ok if the posting did not appear in the WildEdit board ...

For wildedit:

search for any line:
^.*\n

Ok, replacing this would delete all lines. So we have to exclude the lines matching a certain expression.
For that, we use a negative lookahead assertion at the beginning of the line:
^(?!whatever).*\n

This will find any line not matching "whatever".

Replace these with nothing ==> all lines not starting with "whatever" will be gone.

[Bob Hansen]

Aaargh!

Thanks MudGuard. I have done this more than once.

Thanks for catching that, I will modify the posting to mention that.

[ben_josephs]

^(?!whatever).*\n

Make sure that

[X] Regular expression

and

Options
[X] '.' does not match a newline character

are selected.

[martib]

thanks for all the help,

but even with the correct options nothing was deleted.

^(?!a href).*\n
^(?!a ).*\n
^(?!href).*\n

none of them worked

[ben_josephs]

It's probably the line endings. Try
^(?!a href).*\r\n

Each line of a text file stored in PC format ends with the two characters: carriage return, line feed (CR LF) (\r\n). WildEdit is somewhat unfriendly in the way it handles carriage returns. If '.' does not match a newline character is selected, then neither . (dot) nor \n matches a carriage return (\r).