Regex to find where consecutive lines end with the same text
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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.









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