2

I want to alter thousands of lines in a project, the line is always one of these formats and is always in the middle of a line.

link() accepts upto 3 parameters and can look like these:

$this->url->link('this/path')
$this->url->link('this/path', '', true)
$this->url->link('this/path', 'something=' . $something, true)
$this->url->link('this/path', 'something=' . $something . '&other=' . $other, true)

I have a put together the following regex which correctly finds the lines I want as set out above with no problem.

// regex
\$this->url->link.*(, true)

I want to be able to remove empty parameters from the line so basically this means:

If parameters two and three match '', true remove them, otherwise remove just paramter three: , true

I tried these:

\$this->url->link.*(.*)
\$this->url->link.*($1)
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1 Answer 1

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1

If I've understood your question, I'd use 2 different replacement operations, one to remove '',true and another to remove ,true.

deleting '', true

Search: \$this->url->link\((.+), '', true\)
Replace: \$this->url->link($1)

This should replace
= $this->url->link('some/thing', '', true)
with
= $this->url->link('some/thing')

deleting , true

Search: \$this->url->link\((.+),(.+), true\)
Replace: \$this->url->link($1,$2)

This should replace
=> $this->url->link('some/thing', 'variable data or empty', true)
with
=> $this->url->link('some/thing', 'variable data or empty')

and also works for
$this->url->link('some/thingthing', 'variable data', true)
replacing it with
$this->url->link('some/thingthing', 'variable data')

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5 Comments

Be extremely careful with mass replacements though, this shouldn't need to be said, but i feel like it's important enough to say anyway.
I have updated my question with real data, hopefully that will help, I think you were understanding my question just not with the right data. Sorry about that.
I fixed the answer, it was missing the backslash on the replace lines, also the '' is the same in both so no need to be replaced, so i removed them from search and replace so they are picked up automatically instead. Thank you very much for your answer, it really helped.
as far as i remember, the replace lines don't need backslashes, i might be wrong though.
It did for me, the line shows red without it, I am using NB8.2 / Ubuntu 16.04 it could just be a distro matter. In any case, it did work with the replace backslash so all is now done.

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