NotePad++ - Why Does Finding ^ Not Work

Question

I am trying to move away from TextPad and I just cant get reg expressions like ^ and $ to be replaced.

I have definitely ticked the regular expression box

What am I doing wrong

EDIT: I am trying to find the start of a new line - In textpad it is find '^' and ensure reg ex is enabled. With notepad++ it does not do that. It just says not found

Answer 1

^ and $ are both anchors in Regex, which means if you want to replace the literal chars ^ and $ you need to escape them, usually with a leading backslash (\^, and \$).

To find the first character on a line use ^.

The start line anchor (^) is a zero-width match, so combining it with the . will find any character at the beginning of a line.

Maybe you can explain what you're actually trying to do?

Answer 2

Because these are special characters that represent the front (^) and end ($) of line. Try escaping them with a \.

Examples:

Match "Cat" at the beginning of the line:

^Cat

Match "Cat" at the end of line:

Cat$

Match "Cat" as only thing on a line:

^Cat$

Match a "$100" within a line:

\$100 

Here is a link for the specifics on regular expression matching within NotePad++

Answer 3

I've had the same issue myself. After some trial and error you can achieve the same by doing the following:

Find: ^(.)

Replace: [the string you wish you insert]\1

What this will do is locate and tag the first character of the line, put in the new string and put the tagged character after it.

For example, I needed to insert a single quote at the start of each line:

Find: ^(.)

Replace: '\1

You can do the same for the end of the line by doing:

Find: (.)$

Replace: \1*[the string you wish to append]*

Answer 4

try the normal search modus

Answer 5

This seems to be a bug in Notepad++ in where the cursor is placed on a match. If you instead search for ^., it will match the first character in a line and repeated Find Nexts will work.

Answer 6

I got it.

Before

• Albert@hotmail.com
• Lucas@gmail.com
• Rober_Klein@aol.com
• Fisher@zmail.com

After

• Albert
• Lucas
• Rober_Klein
• Fisher

Remove after character or text

@(.*)$

Remove before character or text

^(.*)@

dot = any character
asterisk = zero or more times

Answer 7

Here is how to do it...

Before:

$_GET['id']; $_GET['nick'];

After:

htmlentities($_GET['id']); htmlentities($_GET['nick']);

So. On the find field put:

$_GET(.*])

On the replace field put:

htmlentities($_GET\1)