Find all characters between " " quotes

[dman357]

I have a large ascii file with characters delimited with quotes( " " ). However there are CRs between the beginning quote and the ending quote. I have tried using the UE find "[~)]+" but it didn't work. I'm brand new to UE so any suggestions would help.

[pietzcker]

Please read the forum readme topic. Mofi has compiled a wealth of information about find/replace operations there.

Assuming (since you say you're brand new to UE) that you have UE V14, do the following: Click on the Advanced button in the search dialog and choose "Perl" as your regex engine. Then check the "Regular expressions" checkbox.

Search for

Code: Select all

"[^ÿ]*?"

Explanation: Match a ", then match any character(s) that are not a ÿ (assuming that this character will never turn up in your files), then match another ". The * means "match zero or more times", the ? makes the * a "lazy quantifier" meaning "match as few characters as possible that still allow the overall regex to match. If you dropped the ? it would match from the very first " all the way to the very last " in your entire file.

HTH,
Tim

[Jane]

Tim,
I'm puzzled about your use of ÿ in the negated character class. Why couldn't you just use a negated quote:
i.e. "[^"]*?"
Using your lazy quantifier it would single step from the first quote until it hit the second one. Maybe I'm missing something here?

Cordially,
jane

[pietzcker]

You're absolutely right, of course! <duh!>

I'm so used to this ÿ-trick to overcome the lack of a "dot matches newline" option that I overlooked the best solution. You don't even need the ? anymore. "[^"]*" should be enough.

Cheers,
Tim