在Notepad ++中使用正则表达式进行迭代？

Question

I have a text file like this:

(A) foo
(B) bar
(B) eggs
x spam

(A), (B) etc. are priority tags. They get changed, after which the file is sorted so that lines with prio (A) are on top. I'm wondering if there is a one-line regex search & replace that will replace ONLY THE FIRST tag (A), the first (B) and so on, with CR/LF [tag], so that the file looks like this:

(A) foo

(B) bar
(B) eggs

x spam

It's easy to make a script that does this. But a regex, callable as a macro in Notepad++ would be just perfect. Any thoughts?

Answer 1

Something like this should do it:

Replace

(\([^)]*\))(.*\r\n)(?!\1)

with

\1\2\r\n

Explanation:

[^)]* means zero or more characters that aren't ) .
\\([^)]*\\) - just gets something in brackets (you need to escape ( and ) with \\ ).
Surrounded by () to store it in the first group (use \\1 to get it).
.*\\r\\n - anything followed by a new line.
Surrounded by () to store it in the second group (use \\2 to get it).
(?!\\1) - negative look-ahead, the same tag shouldn't be on the next line.