Notepad++ find and replace expression help

Question

I want to find all content between two characters, say A and B:

Asd;lfksjd;fsdfjs;ldfkB which would be sd;lfksjd;fsdfjs;ldfk

and replace them. How would I write this expression?

Answer 1

You can match any character between A and B with the following RegEx:

(?<=A).*(?=B)

This doesn't return A or B as part of the matched characters.

• (?<=A) means that A comes before the main expression and that if it matches you don't want it included in the main result.

• .* means match any character that occurs 0 or more times. If you want at least a single character to be between A and B you can use .+ instead.

• (?=B) means that B comes after the main expression and that if it matches you don't want it included in the main result.

Edit:

Notepad++ does not support lookahead/behind, so you can replace

(A).*(B)

with

\1\2

instead.

Note that this is greedy, so if have "AxB y AzB", you'll get "AB". To get "AB y AB", use

(A).*?(B)

instead.

*Edited non-greedy, .?* was incorrect

Answer 2

I'm very new to regular expressions so hopefully this works for you.

I think A.*B would be the regular expression to search for. That is, search for A and B with zero or more things between them.

This regular expression includes the A and B in the match so you'd have to add them back in with the replace.

AreplaceB Would be the text to replace it with.