regex search to find files not containing a string

You can run a regular expression search which will find any files which do not contain a word or phrase that you designate.

In this example we have a set of text files, only one of which contains the word, 'panda'.

Using a text editor like NotePad ++ we run the following search to locate any files which do not have this string:

(?s)\A((?!panda).)+\z

. . . use the option to Find All using the Find in Files tool, and only the files in the folder in which you search which do not contain the string will be listed in the results pane.

regular expression search to get the line count in a text file

Running the regular expression search:

\S+\s*$

. . . in a text editor like NotePad++ will generate a count of the number of non-empty lines in a text file. The number of hits will be shown in the results pane below the transcript.

In order to get a count of the number of empty lines you can run this RegEx search: ^\s*$

. . . but note that it will count consecutive lines with only whitespace as a single line.

Regex to find where consecutive lines end with the same text

Tonight's tip features a regular expression script created by The fourth bird of the Netherlands on stack overflow. I posted looking for a regular expression that would find the text on a line repeated from the prior line after a time code at the beginning of the both lines that might be different. See this example:

(11:12:21) [Tom]: Hello this is Tom. Who is it?

(11:14:08) [Tom]: Hello this is Tom. Who is it?

The goal was to find when consecutive lines were the same after the first 10 characters. The fourth bird came up with a solution that would find when parts of two lines matched. In a text editor like NotePad++ run this find and replace search:

FIND: ^(\([^][]*\))(.*)(?:\r?\n\([^][]*\)\2)+

REPLACE: $1$2

^(\([^][]*\)) will find the first part of the string - the time code in parentheses. So the caret ^ matches the beginning of the line, and the rest then finds the rest of the text between the parentheses.

(.*) matches to the end of the line after the parenthetical information at the beginning.

(?:\r?\n this then matches a new group on a new line

\([^][]*\) this matches from the first part of the previous line.

\2)+ this then matches with the second part of the previous line.

As you can see in this demonstration a find and replace in the text editor can easily remove the duplicate lines.