notepad++ - How to use a regex to organize song lists, changing their order from "Song - Artist" to "Artist - Song"?

notepad++ regex playlists

08
2014-07

screener

I have a long list of songs in the format "Artist - Song", but I want them to be listed as "Artist - Song". How to change all items automatically with a regular expression, preferably on Notepad++?

Answers

screener

On Notepad++:

Click before the first letter in your file for the search to run throughout the complete list
Press CTRL + H to open the text editor Replace dialog
Check the Regular expression search mode
Type (.*?)\s-\s(.*) in the "Find what" field. It means "select and save everything until a hyphen preceded by a space" and then "everything after the hyphen followed by a space"
Type \2 - \1 in the Replace with field to insert the two sets reversed
Click on Replace all

Note: if it doesn't work, make sure that the list uses the same hyphen character as the one you typed into the Find what field.

Screenshot of the Notepad++ "Replace" dialog

Related Answers

John Weldon

^ and $ are both anchors in Regex, which means if you want to replace the literal chars ^ and $ you need to escape them, usually with a leading backslash (\^, and \$).

To find the first character on a line use ^.

The start line anchor (^) is a zero-width match, so combining it with the . will find any character at the beginning of a line.

Maybe you can explain what you're actually trying to do?

Peter Mortensen

Because these are special characters that represent the front (^) and end of line ($). Try escaping them with a \\.

Examples:

Match "Cat" at the beginning of the line:

^Cat

Match "Cat" at the end of line:

Cat$

Match "Cat" as only thing on a line:

^Cat$

Match a "$100" within a line:

\$100

Here is a link for the specifics on regular expression matching within Notepad++.

Willy

I've had the same issue myself. After some trial and error you can achieve the same by doing the following:

Find: ^(.)

Replace: [the string you wish you insert]\1

What this will do is locate and tag the first character of the line, put in the new string and put the tagged character after it.

For example, I needed to insert a single quote at the start of each line:

Find: ^(.)

Replace: '\1

You can do the same for the end of the line by doing:

Find: (.)$

Replace: \1*[the string you wish to append]*

ezequias

I got it.

Before

After

Albert
Lucas
Rober_Klein
Fisher

Remove after character or text

@(.*)$

Remove before character or text

^(.*)@

dot = any character
asterisk = zero or more times

Tom Wijsman

Here is how to do it...

Before:

$_GET['id']; $_GET['nick'];

After:

htmlentities($_GET['id']); htmlentities($_GET['nick']);

So. On the find field put:

$_GET(.*])

On the replace field put:

htmlentities($_GET\1)

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notepad++ - How to use a regex to organize song lists, changing their order from "Song - Artist" to "Artist - Song"?