正则表达式在Notepad ++中替换管道之间的换行符

Question

I am quite new to regex.

I have a pipe-delimited text file that contains free text data. I need to find a way to replace newline characters in the free text fields with commas in Notepad++. There is a fixed count of 23 fields.

I managed to come up with ^([^\\|]*\\|){22}[^\\|]*$ to identify a full record. How do I replace the newlines (\\n) within these strings to collapse all into one liners?

Sample of data in regex101.com: https://regex101.com/r/aY4jF3/2 Records that start with 1a and 1c need to be collapsed into one line with commas in between field 13's value ( ...|1,3|... )

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The regular expression you can use for your replacement is:

(^(?:[^\|\n]*\|){1,21}[^\|\n]+)[\r\n]{1,2}

The first group ( (^(?:[^\\|\\n]*\\|){1,21}[^\\|\\n]+) ) captures the lines which have up to 21 pipe characters (so lines that are not full). It's a capturing group as it will be needed for replacement. The rest matches the new line characters.

And you should replace with

\1,

Which will take the line except the new line characters and add a comma.

If you put your cursor at the start of the file and replace all, it will work correctly provided that merged lines will form full lines (with more than 21 pipes). After the first half is merged with the second, the full line no longer matches the regex and replacement moves on.

Before replacement:

After replacement:

Tested in Notepad++ 6.8.8.