Dynamic Regex find and replace pattern

Question

My aim is to turn something like this:

src/com/company/folder/anotherfolder/manyfolders/filename.java

into this:

a few words com.company.folder.anotherfolder.manyfolders filename "description"

I've got it mostly to work with the following find and replace:

Find: (.*?)/(.*?)/(.*?)/(.*?)/(.*?)/(.*?)/(.*?)/(.*?)/(.*?)(\..*)

Replace: a few words $2\.$3\.$4\.$5\.$6\.$7\.$8\040$9\040"description"

Which works okay, however I may have different number of folders, so it won't work in that case.

How can I make it so that it works for any number of folders?

Jerry · Accepted Answer · 2015-05-11 07:40:20Z

1

You are carrying out two distinct processes here:

Replacing all / by .
Adding text before and after the replacement result and some other minor changes.

This is not possible with a single regex and if you still want to do it with the find/replace function of notepad++, you will need to do two replaces. I suggest the below replaces:

Replace / by . (no need for regex here, but if you have / you don't want to replace, then it becomes more complex and you might to use a regex like (?:(?!^)\G|)\K/(?=[^.\r\n]*\.) for the find and . for the replace).

Regex replace of

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

And replace with

a few words $1 $2 "description"

I am using this regex with the assumptions that folder and filenames can contain spaces and occupy a full line.

answered May 11, 2015 at 7:40

Jerry

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nneonneo · Accepted Answer · 2015-05-11 06:01:16Z

1

Consider using a few regexes in a row:

Convert slashes
```
/
```
=>
```
.
```

Convert the rest

([a-zA-Z0-9\.]+)\.(\w+)\.java

=>

a few words $1 $2 "description"

answered May 11, 2015 at 6:01

nneonneo

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2 Comments

Aequitas Over a year ago

it would suit me much better to be just a single regex find and replace, is there no way to combine our two since mine does it in one step but yours does it dynamically

nneonneo Over a year ago

Nope, sorry. Regex is powerful but it doesn't have that functionality - to do multiple different kinds of replacement in a single expression.

Evan Knowles · Accepted Answer · 2015-05-11 05:56:32Z

0

You'd need to repeat on the / character - have you tried something like:

((.*)/)(.*)

answered May 11, 2015 at 5:56

Evan Knowles

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