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From this file:

xxxxxxx; foo("this should be extracted 1"); bar("this should not be extracted"); yyyyyyy zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz foo("this should be extracted 2") uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

I want to get this:

this should be extracted 1 this should be extracted 2

I only managed to select the strings I want to extract using this regex: (?<=foo\(")(.*?)(?="\)). But I can't find a way to extract it or to delete all the unmarked text.

I put some x, y, z and u characters in the example just to show that in this file there are a lot of other things in the same line

Could somebody help me?

Thanks!

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2 Answers 2

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1

You can use ^(?:(?!foo\(\").)*$ to delete all lines not containing foo("

Then ^\r\n to remove empty lines

And then use ^.*foo\(\"(.*?)\"\).* to replace all with \1

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2
  • Ctrl+H
  • Find what: (?:^|\G).*?foo\("(.+?)"\)(?:(?!\bfoo\().)*
  • Replace with: $1
  • check Wrap around
  • check Regular expression
  • UNCHECK . matches newline
  • Replace all

Explanation:

(?:^|\G) # beginning of line OR restart from last match position .*? # 0 or more any character but newline, not greedy foo\(" # literally (.+?) # group 1, 1 or more any character but newline not greedy, what to be extracted "\) (?:(?!\foo\().)* # Tempered greedy token, make sure we haven't "foo" after

Replacement:

$1 # content of group 1, what to be extracted

Result for given example:

this should be extracted 1 this should be extracted 2

Screen capture:

enter image description here

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