A similar solution to the one Louis suggested is to again use Regular expression search within Notepad++, with the search parameter:
(^.+?)\s.*$
And replace with:
\1
The advantage/difference of this version over Louis' one is that it will also match first words like Apostrophy's
or Colons:
or Hyphen-ated
where there are non alphanumeric characters.
This matches everything from the start of each line (the ^
symbol means start of line).
It finds at least one character (.+?
is non-greedy match one or more characters) stopping as soon as it finds a blank (\s
is blank/space).
It then carries on matching everything else in the line (.*
is match zero or more characters), up to the end of the line ($
is end of line).
The \1
will then only keep the section matched within the brackets, I.E. everything before the first space in the line.
N.B. make sure the . matches newline
checkbox is unticked, or you will only get the first word in the whole document.