NotePad++ Get words with REGEX Pattern of Delimiters

Question

I am currently using this REGEX to get whole words with a prefix of PRE_

\b(PRE_)\S*

This works fine for most cases, but I would like to handle cases when a special character is part of the word, such as a period, comma or other special character . , ; - { } ( ) [ ]

For example, the words here:

PRE_samplewordwithoutdelimiter
PRE_sampleword.otherwordsnotincluded;
PRE_Sampleword{}...deleted
PRE_complexword()a.;.is deleted
Somewords ahead PRE_sometext() ending in other words
Words with bracket [PRE_brackettext] are deleted
PRE_sampleword is spaced out so deleted
sampleword.PRE_deleted;
notdeleted.notdeleted.PRE_

I would like only to find the first part of a delimited word. So I can delete or replace the word. So, in the case of replacing all PRE_ prefixed words in this scenario with "" as the text, I would get:

<DELETED>
<DELETED>.otherwordsnotincluded;
<DELETED>{}...deleted
<DELETED>()a.;.is deleted
Somewords ahead <DELETED>() ending in other words
Words with bracket [<DELETED>] are deleted
<DELETED> is spaced out so deleted
sampleword.<DELETED>;
notdeleted.notdeleted.<DELETED>

I was trying different REGEX, but nothing really matches entirely correct throughout the samples. Something like the following doesn't work:

\b(PRE_)\S*(?:[;]|[.][-])$

Any help here would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Method 1

Instead of including all non-space character (\S in your first regex) after PRE_, simply state all "non-delimiters" in your search and it should do.

The following works for all of your example, by replacing \S with [A-Za-z]:

\bPRE_[A-Za-z]*

If you wish to include numeric, hyphen (-) and underscore (_) you can use the following instead:

\bPRE_[-A-Za-z0-9_]*

Method 2

Otherwise, you could modify your \S into "anything but \s and other delimiters such as ., ,, ;, {. }, (, ), [, ] (and any others at your wish)" In that way your regex becomes

\bPRE_[^.;,{}()[\]\s]*

The phrase [^blahblah] means any character except blahblah.