Replace every nth instance of a character with a new line in Notepad++

Question

I have a pipe delimited string of NAME|VALUE pairs looking something like this..

Name1|Value1|Name2|Value2|Name3|Value3

What I want to do is to replace every second instance of | with a new line so that I have something like this..

Name1|Value1
Name2|Value2
Name3|Value3

My issue isn't the new-line, as I know I can use \r\n for that, but rather the regex part that only replaces every second instance of |.

Answer 1

Find: ([^\|]*\|[^\|]*)\|
Replace to: \1\n

Answer 2

I want to replace every second instance of | with a new line

• Menu "Search" > "Replace" (or Ctrl + H)

• Set "Find what" to (.*?\|.*?)[\|]

• Set "Replace with" to \1\r\n

• Enable "Regular expression"

• Click "Replace All"

  

Before:

Name1|Value1|Name2|Value2|Name3|Value3

After:

Name1|Value1
Name2|Value2
Name3|Value3

Notes:

• The above assumes you are editing a text file with Windows EOLs, \r\n.

• If you are using files with different EOLs you can convert them to Windows EOLs using Menu "Edit" > "EOL Conversion".

• If you aren't working with Windows EOL, and you don't wish to convert them, use the following instead:

  • Use \n instead of \r\n for Unix/OS X EOLs

  • Use \r instead of \r\n for Mac OS (up to version 9) EOLs

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Further reading

• Notepad++: A guide to using regular expressions and extended search mode

Answer 3

This attempts to show how to replace every Nth character with a newline without copy-pasting parts of the sequence. In such case a number is needed to tell the engine how many repetitions are expected. In this example I want to replace every 13th occurrence of character @ with a newline. You can see 12 (13-1) repetitions of non-capturing group plus remaining text before the 13th character @ in one captured group. Then there's matched, but not captured 13th character @ which will be replaced with \r\n.

Find what: ((?:.*?\@){12}.*?)\@
Replace with: $1\r\n
Check Wrap around
Search Mode = Regular expression
Replace All

^{The character @ should be changed to your actual separator character (it's repeated two times in the pattern). E.g., if your separator is |, your pattern would be ((?:.*?\|){12}.*?)\|
Also, the number 12 should be replaced with your value (N-1).}