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I have a large block of text, containing one or more instances of each of a list of words. I need to add a prefix to all instances of each word on the list.

Here's an example of what I'm trying to do -

List of words:

foo
bar

Prefix:

xyz

Text before:

onklnagknaubosabdof foo dklfn fknk foo klnksdnia bar dsknska foo knkn bar

Text after:

onklnagknaubosabdof xyzfoo dklfn fknk xyzfoo klnksdnia xyzbar dsknska xyzfoo knkn xyzbar

How can I do this in Notepad++? Or is there another tool that can do this for me easily?

aforest-ccc
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1 Answers1

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  • Ctrl+H
  • Find what: (?=\b(?:foo|bar)\b)
  • Replace with: xyz
  • UNcheck Match case
  • check Wrap around
  • check Regular expression
  • Replace all

Explanation:

(?=         # start lookahead, make sure we have after:
  \b        # word boundary, to NOT match xyzfoo or foobar
  (?:       # start non capture group
    foo     # literally
   |        # OR
    bar     # literally
  )         # end group
  \b        # word boundary, to NOT match xyzfoo or foobar
)           #end lookahead

Result for given example:

onklnagknaubosabdof xyzfoo dklfn fknk xyzfoo klnksdnia xyzbar dsknska xyzfoo knkn xyzbar

Screen capture:

enter image description here

If you want to replace foobar with xyzfooxyzbar, remove the word boundaries:

  • Find what: (?=(?:foo|bar))
Toto
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  • Thanks for the complete explanation of the regular expression! This is particularly helpful for me, since I'm not that familiar with regular expression syntax. – aforest-ccc Aug 29 '19 at 06:36