Series of Replaces in Notepad++

Question

I have about 200 regular expression searches and it's a pain to copy and paste them one by one. Is there an addon/plugin for Notepad++ that would automatically fill in the Search For and Replace fields or something of the sorts? If not is there a better way to do it? I would be dealing with the same file and using all of the same searches and probably add more searches as time goes on.

Answer 1

Notepad++ is not suited for this kind of batch work. I'd recommend you to find another tool, or try a scripting language.

If you really want to use Notepad++ for this task, I think you have only 2 options:

• Macros. You can record a macro while you are applying your regular expressions one-by-one in the Replace dialog. Save it, and then you can Play the Macro whenever and wherever you want. Caveat: you can't easily add new regular expressions. Actually it's possible by modifying manually the shortcuts.xml that you will find in your %APPDATA%\Notepad++\ folder. This is where the recorded Macros are stored after you restart Notepad++. You can cut a new Macro with your new regular expressions and paste it in your older Macro. But it's a dirty job, I'll suggest you to move on to the next option.

• Python Script plugin. You can write a Python script applying all your regular expressions. Once the script created, it will be very easy to add new regular expressions. Check a previous post of mine on how to install and use the plugin and then edit the following script (let's name it batch_regex.py) accordingly:

  editor.pyreplace(r"foo", r"bar") #this is a Python regular expression
  editor.pyreplace(r"baz", r"qux") #add here new regular expressions
  editor.pyreplace(r"test", r"yeah") #your third regular expression
  #etc...
  
  #if you have multiline regular expressions use pymlreplace instead (documentation: http://npppythonscript.sourceforge.net/docs/latest/scintilla.html#pymlreplace)