在以特定单词开头，后跟以分号分隔的单词的行中，用逗号替换分号并用双引号括起单词

Question

I'm trying to change certain lines in my file using notepad++ and I have very less knowledge at regular expressions and henceforth seeking help. Any kind of help is appreciable.

Find all the lines that looks like as See ABC'D EFG;IJKL;FOO;BAR;XXXXson on.

1. Lines that starts with word "See"
2. After that,there are words all in Capital letters and separated by semicolon

3. Words can have special characters

   a) space

   b) ' (apostrophy)

   c) , (comma)

   d) - (hiphen)

4. Ends with a full stop .

And replace those lines as:

See:["ABC'D EFG","IJKL","FOO","BAR",....]

Answer 1

find what: See ([A-Z'\\-, ]+)\\;([A-Z'\\-, ]+)\\.
replace with: See:["\\1", "\\2"]
see https://regex101.com/r/bfJkN6/3
also tested on my notepad++, got See:["ABC'D EFG", "IJKL"]
I updated the regex to catch multi hits on https://regex101.com/r/bfJkN6/5
See ((([A-Z'\\-, ]+)\\;)+)([A-Z'\\-, ]+)\\.

Answer 2

Use \\W which matches any non-word character

Example https://regex101.com/r/lFANF0/4

Find See\\s([AZ' ]+)\\W(\\w+)\\. and Replace See:["$1","$2"]

1stGroup (\\w+\\'\\w+\\s+) \\w+ matches any word character (equal to [a-zA-Z0-9_] )
+ Matches between one and unlimited times
\\s+ matches any whitespace character (equal to [\\r\\n\\t\\f\\v ] )
2nd Group (\\w+\\W*\\w+) \\W* matches any non-word character (equal to [ ^a-zA-Z0-9_] )

Answer 3

Lets say the number of semi-colon is variable. You need to proceed in two passes.
Use Replace All for the two passes:

find: ^See \\K([AZ ,;'-]+)\\.
replace: ["$1"]

and then:

find: (?:\\G(?!^)|^See \\["(?=[^"]*"]))[^";]*\\K;
replace: ", "

The first pass is easy to understand, it only finds corresponding lines, remove the final dot and encloses the part with uppercase letters, commas, spaces, semi-colons, apostrophes and hyphens between double quotes and square brackets.

The second pass needs to replace only semi-colons inside quotes and square brackets for lines that start with See . To do that I used the second branch ^See \\["(?=[^"]*"]) to reach the interesting lines and the \\G anchor in the second branch to ensure that the next matches are contiguous to the first. Since [^";]* excludes the double quote, once the last semicolon is reached, the first branch can no longer succeed and the contiguity is broken.