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I was trying to find a way to remove duplicated strings within Notepad++ (not removing duplicated lines). For example, if I have the text:

Alice's favorite ice cream (not gelato) is: Vanilla! Alice's favorite ice cream (not gelato) is: Vanilla! Please go get some ice cream from the store

The result should be

Alice's favorite ice cream (not gelato) is: Vanilla! Please go get some ice cream from the store

I tried looking up some examples and found this but it doesn't really work exactly as expected. Thanks in advance.

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  • how do you identify what is a duplicated string? is it always a line that contains the duplicate? Commented Apr 9, 2015 at 15:43
  • Basically every line has a duplicated string, but rather than manually going through and deleting the duplicated portions of the string I would like to automate it somehow. Commented Apr 9, 2015 at 16:17

2 Answers 2

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If you have consecutive duplicates then you can use a regex like this:

(.*)\1

Working demo

And use the replacemente string: \1 or $1 as you can see in the substitution section in the screenshot.

enter image description here

Update: as 1010 pointed in this comment:

beware that it may match duplicates like the 'o' in "look", or parts of a sentence that repeats characters as in "... this is a duplicate"

You can prevent this by creating a limitation for minimal duplicated chars. For instance, this regex looks for duplicated chars that will have at least 5 duplicated characters (you can modify the numbere for what you consider right):

(.{5,})\1
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7 Comments

In Notepad++ 6.7.5 this just gives me the message "Zero length match" and no changes are made to the file.
@AdrianHHH I'm using 5.9.6 and works fine for me. I'll try updating the version
beware that it may match duplicates like the 'o' in "look", or parts of a sentence that repeats characters as in "... this is a duplicate".
@1010 Thanks, for the comment. I improved the answer thanks to you
@Fede Is there any way to accommodate the case where words with double letter would be after the duplicated text? For example: Alice's favorite ice cream (not gelato) is: Vanilla! Alice's favorite ice cream (not gelato) is: Vanilla! Please go get some ice cream from the store, and hurry! would be changed to Alice's favorite ice cream (not gelato) is: Vanilla! Please go get some ice cream from the store, and hury!
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I just had a similar problem and wanted to remove duplicate lines. It turns out that there is already a built-in feature to do that.

Just go to "Edit->Line Operations->Remove Consecutive Duplicate Lines".

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