Using regex in notepad ++ to extract text and if not found

Question

I have a large number of txt-files and aim to extract a certain piece of text out of each of them. I managed to this for most of my files using regex in notepad. I just use find-and-replace for all files in a folder using a pretty elaborate regex:

Find:

.*(pretty elaborate regex).*

Replace:

$1

This works great. However, some of my documents do not contain the specific piece of text I am looking for. Notepad will leave these documents unchanged. How can I let it put a text in these documents which says for example: "no_match_found"

Thanks for you help! Andreas

Do you mean you want to replace the whole document in those files? — Wiktor Stribiżew, Sep 06 '16 at 10:29

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:16

1

Maybe this post will help you: How to negate the whole regex?

Use negative lookaround: (?!pattern)

You can just match for the negated regex and place the text then

edited May 23 '17 at 12:16

Community

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answered Sep 06 '16 at 10:25

meetaig

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score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 06 '16 at 10:34

It is quite easy with the Boost conditional replacement pattern. Add a |(.*) alternative branch to your regex (make sure the . matches newline is ON) and use (?1$1:NO_MATCH_FOUND) pattern that will eaither insert the Group 1 value, or will just replace the whole document with the literal text NO_MATCH_FOUND.

Here is an example of what happens to a document having no match:

Using regex in notepad ++ to extract text and if not found

2 Answers2