Notepad++ 正则表达式从 Markdown 格式化脚注中删除字符

Question

This is a follow-up question to what was solved yesterday: Notepad++ Regex Replace Makeshift Footnotes format With Proper Markdown format

I managed to find a Regex to remove the offending semicolons in the main text area but by only cutting out the text and pasting back the result, which can only be done one by one. I'm not sure how this can be done, but the expert can tell me.

So I have footnote references in markdown format. Two instances of the same thing:

[^1]:
[^2]:
.
.
.
[^99]:

I might not have 99 in a document but I wanted to show I need to match two digits here again. As I said, there are two instances of these numbered references in the text. One in the main text pointing to the footnote and the footnote at the end of the document. What I need is deleting the semi-colons from the main text and leave the

[^3]:
[^15]:
etc.

references at the end intact.

Because the main text references come after a word or at the end of a sentence (ususally before the sentence-ending period), there is never a case a reference would start a sentence (even if they seem to appear there once or twice because of word wrap).

I provided the exact opposite of my needs here: Click here for Regex101 website link

I put in the exact opposite of what I want because I already knew of the

^

sign to match anything that is at the front of the line. Now I would like to negate this, if possible, so that I would delete the semi-colons in the main text, not down at the bottom.

Of course, it is likely that my approach is not good and you'll come up with a completely different approach. Especially because there doesn't seem to be a NOT operator in Regex, if I read correctly.

I repeat: the Regex101 example with the match and substitution is exactly the opposite of what I want. I am not sure if you can play around in the substitution line to get the desired negative effect.

I could have probably asked for removing the first occurence of semi-colons but I thought the important part of tackling the problem is that those items not to be matched are always at the start of the line, not the others.

Thanks for any suggestions

Answer 1

In Notepad++ you might use a negative lookabehind asserting not the start of the string to the left, and use \K to clear the match buffer matching only the colon that should be replaced by an empty string.

(?<!^)\[\^\d{1,2}]\K:

Explanation

• (?<!^) Negative lookbehind, assert not the start of the start directly to the left
• \[\^ Match [^
• \d{1,2} Match 1 or 2 digits
• ] Match literally
• \K Forget what is matched so far
• : Match a colon

Regex demo