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I'm having mild frustration trying to bludgeon my tab delimited data files into shape.

As the title implies, when I do something like this in a two column file:

Find what: Replace: It matches the first class, then the tab but then grabs the newline in the second class.

The intention is to take something like:
And turn it into:
But what I get is:
I was under the impression that [^\n] did not match newline characters. [^$] doesn't seem to help, it matches to the end of the document rather than the end of the line.

I think line endings might be at play here. As in, \r gets captured, inserting a new line when referenced.

I was able to get it to work in a new blank document with:

Find what: Replace:

JohnFoelster wrote: Wed Dec 03, 2025 9:41 pm[^$] doesn't seem to help

$ has no special meaning inside square brackets - it only literally matches a dollar sign. Just like a dot or asterisk are no metacharacters inside character classes.

I always find it easier to think about what to match, rather than not match, unless otherwise necessary. On that basis, this works for me:

Find what: Replace with: Note that "\2" in the search string is a back reference to what matched in the second sub-expression, which is the digit after "TEXT ".

You'll need to add repeat operators to the "\d"s, if numbers can have more than one digit.

gurok wrote: Thu Dec 04, 2025 4:47 am I think line endings might be at play here. As in, \r gets captured, inserting a new line when referenced.

I was able to get it to work in a new blank document with:

Find what:

Code: Select all

([^\r\t\n]+)\t([^\r\t\n]+)\r\n\1\t([^\t\r\n]+)

Replace:

Code: Select all

\1\t\2,\3

Hmmm... yup, that did it. Thank you.

AmigoJack wrote: Thu Dec 04, 2025 7:17 am

JohnFoelster wrote: Wed Dec 03, 2025 9:41 pm[^$] doesn't seem to help

$ has no special meaning inside square brackets - it only literally matches a dollar sign. Just like a dot or asterisk are no metacharacters inside character classes.

Huh... I'd swear that used to mean "until the end of the line" when I was first learning RegEx in TextPad 23 years ago.

Must be senility.

bbadmin wrote: Thu Dec 04, 2025 1:52 pm I always find it easier to think about what to match, rather than not match

I like to live dangerously...

@JohnFoelster:

Outside of square brackets, $ does mean end of line, but inside, it's a literal match.