IDEA:two options text manipulation tool

[rapstar]

Hey, i need a simple tool which manipulates text strings. Two options are crucial: a) add needed text in the beginning of each line and b) replace everything from text to find till the end of the line with desired text.

I guess this could be done in like notepad++ with regexps but i failed to make an expression.

My strings are like

mp3search.com/search.php?artist=Janis+Joplin

and i need to add http:// in the beginning of each line and replace from artist= till the end of string with what i want... used to work manually, bit here come thousands of 'em  

[skwire]

Do you already have a list of artists you want to search?

[mouser]

Many clipboard tools can do this kind of thing, including my Clipboard Help+Spell.  They are a bit overkill if you don't need the clipboard and text formatting features regularly.

ps. Thumbs up for Janis Joplin, one of the greats 

[skwire]

I was going to offer my ListNumberer app as a way to do what he wants.  He can just paste in his list of search terms and then use "http://mp3search.com/search.php?artist=" as a prefix.

[cranioscopical]

I was going to offer my ListNumberer app as a way to do what he wants.  He can just paste in his list of search terms and then use "http://mp3search.com/search.php?artist=" as a prefix.

-skwire (May 17, 2011, 03:39 PM)

And a very nice app it is too.      (Just the job for this task.)

[rapstar]

list numberer worked like a charm when i needed to add the same string to the beginning

*except it looks weird if you put like 140% scale in your win xp

for my second replacement need, it's no just adding things in the end, i need to search for given expression and then replace everything till the end of the line, expression itself included

actually it's not like search.php?artist= in the end, url i get from parsing are like

search.php?artist=Patti+Smith&onetwo=true&areyousure=yes&hash=5655434&clientid=12343&

so i want to get rid of unnesessary paremeters

going to try Clipboard Help+Spell, many thanks

[Jibz]

I don't know if I understood exactly what you wanted to replace, but in Notepad++ maybe something along the lines of replace

[Select]

([^\?]+)\?([^&]+).*

with

[Select]

http://\1?\2

(make sure regular expression is ticked).

I.e. grab everything up to the first ? on the line and store that in \1, grab everything after that and up to the first & and put that in \2, match the rest of the line to get that removed.

[MilesAhead]

There are many editors that can use either regular expressions as Jibz noted, or their own symbolic pattern characters, that can replace pattern with text or include the pattern in the replacement.  Although you tend to encounter them more on other OS.  Windows freeware editors tend to be more limited.

You may want to try one of the Windows ports of vi. That editor can do some amazing things in command mode if you don't mind jumping in and out of edit mode.  Can make you a bit schizoid but if you are really into complicated editing you may not mind.

I never got really adept at vi but when I was playing with Linux a lot I used it enough to start to see the versatility.