Notepad++ RegEx on XML File

Question

First, I am new to regular expressions.

I have an XML File that is formatted as so:

<SCHED_TABLE LAST_UPLOAD="" ... TABLE_NAME="">
<JOB
  APPLICATION=""
  ...
  NODEID="foo"
  ...
>
</JOB>
<JOB
  APPLICATION=""
  ...
  NODEID="bar"
  ...
>
</JOB>
</SCHED_TABLE>

With a whole lot of lines in between. What I need to do is write a regular expression to find all the JOB's where NODEID != foo. Those that do NOT equal foo will be replaced with a blank, therefore deleting those jobs. The whole job needs to be deleted including the open and close JOB tag.

Any advice for this?

elixenide · Accepted Answer · 2013-12-03 20:47:18Z

3

Try this (untested):

Find:

<JOB[^>]+?NODEID="(?!foo)[^>]+?>.+?</JOB>

Replace with blank.

Make sure . matches newline (or whatever that option is called -- I'm away from my normal computer) is checked.

Breakdown of how this works:

<JOB matches the start of a JOB tag.
[^>]+? matches everything that is not a > symbol, but the ? means "don't be greedy" -- that is, don't use more characters than you need to.
NODEID=" means match literally those characters.
(?!foo) is a negative look-ahead pattern. It means, "This is not a match if everything has worked so far but the text following this point is foo."
[^>]+?, again, all non-> characters, but not greedy.
> match the > character exactly.
.+? Match any string of characters, but don't be greedy (i.e., stop when you hit the last part of the regex, </JOB>)
</JOB> closing tag.

Ordinarily, .+? would not match newline characters, which is why you need to tell Notepad++ to let it do so.

edited Dec 3, 2013 at 20:47

answered Dec 2, 2013 at 21:50

elixenide

44.9k16 gold badges79 silver badges103 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

2 Comments

jeff_dude Over a year ago

Ed, if you don't mind, can you take a moment and explain each step of this expression in regular terms? I want to make sure I understand exactly what is going on. Again, thanks for the quick answer!

elixenide Over a year ago

Glad it helped. I added an explanation above.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Notepad++ RegEx on XML File

1 Answer 1

2 Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

2 Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related