Programmer’s Notepad has great support for Regular Expressions baked in, supporting much more than the restricted syntax that many Scintilla-based editors provide. For example, did you know that you can use negative lookarounds to find text that doesn’t contain a pattern? This regular expression matches any line that doesn’t contain “not here”:
^((?!not here).)*$
Sometimes I find myself repeating the same set of Search/Replace operations in order to format text. If I’m going to do this more than a couple of times, I record a script using PyPN to make things easier for myself. Today I was turning text like this:
LogStep("Do something");
MyClass.DoReallyCleverStuff();
MyClass.VerifySomethingAwesome();
LogStep("Do another thing");
MyClass.DoSomethingLessClever();
MyClass.VerifySomethingBad();
Into text like this:
Do something
Do another thing
There are many ways to do something like this, and I could have written a PyPN script by hand to do it. However, combining Regular Expressions and Script Recording means I can do this without a lot of manual code effort. Here’s what I did:
- Tools > Record Script
- Replace All:
^((?!LogStep).)*$ with (nothing)
- Replace All:
(\r\n){2,} with \r\n
- Replace All:
\s*LogStep\("([^"]+)"\); with \1
- Tools > Stop Recording
At the end of this Programmer’s Notepad added a script to the Scripts window (Recorded\New Script) and placed the code for that script in a new editor window. Because I wanted to keep the script for future use, I changed it’s name and saved it to C:\Program Files\Programmer’s Notepad\Scripts. Here’s the script (which I reduced slightly for posting here):
import pn, scintilla
@script("Clean Up Log Steps", "Testing")
def CleanUpLogSteps():
doc = pn.CurrentDoc()
sci = scintilla.Scintilla(doc)
opt = pn.GetUserSearchOptions()
opt.FindText = u'^((?!LogStep).)*$'
opt.MatchWholeWord = False
opt.MatchCase = False
opt.UseRegExp = True
opt.SearchBackwards = False
opt.LoopOK = True
opt.UseSlashes = False
opt.ReplaceText = u''
opt.ReplaceInSelection = False
doc.ReplaceAll(opt)
# When recording, the result of this operation was: pn.FindNextResult(37)
opt.FindText = u'(\\r\\n\\r\\n){2,}'
opt.ReplaceText = u'\\r\\n'
doc.ReplaceAll(opt)
# When recording, the result of this operation was: pn.FindNextResult(16)
opt.FindText = u'\\s*LogStep\\("([^"]+)"\\);'
opt.ReplaceText = u'\\1'
doc.ReplaceAll(opt)
# When recording, the result of this operation was: pn.FindNextResult(10)
If I was going to use this script a lot, I could bind it to a shortcut key in Tools > Options > Keyboard.
