Regular Expression to Find Something Until String in Notepad++

Question

I'm trying to find a way to find and replace in Notepad++ and I can't figure out how to do the regex that would allow me to do so. I need to find all

<Element
          Attribute1="<!--Any one letter-->34_<!--Anything-->"
          <!--Multiple Attributes on multiple lines-->
          <!--Until-->
          AttributeToMatch="Value"
          <!--Multiple Attributes on multiple lines--> />

I want the following:

<Element
          Attribute1="<!--Any one letter-->34_<!--Anything-->"
          <!--Multiple Attributes on multiple lines-->
          <!--Until-->
          AttributeToMatch="NewValue"
          <!--Multiple Attributes on multiple lines--> />

I need to be able to replace only the "SpecificValue" with another Value for hundreds of elements so I wanted to find a way to do it more quickly and efficiently then doing it manually.

So far I came up with:

Which doesn't work (nothing is found) and I don't understand why. Thanks

Answer 1

Alright, I haven't tried this in Notepad++ specifically, but give it a go.

/\<Element[\S\s]*Attribute1\=\".*34_.*\"[\S\s]*AttributeToMatch\=\"([^\"]*)\"[\S\s]*\/\>[\S\s]*(?=\<Element)/igm

The igm is just notation that means it should be case insensitive, global, and multiline. Strip that off for Notepad++ probably.

You'll also need to be able to replace capture group $1 with your new value. Again, I'm not sure how that works in Notepad++.

The [\\S\\s]* groups match anything including newlines.

Finally, it avoids capturing more than one element at a time with a lookahead for <Element . It could also match the end of file if Notepad++ supports it, or add a fake

(My gut feeling remains that you'll have an easier time just parsing the XML and making the changes that way.)