Comment/Delete all lines that contains a particular string.

[Rodrigo Oliveira]

Hi,
I´m struggling to do a script that comment all lines containing the string "test" on my files.

I try to do something like that, but it´s not working because a i do not know when the search is done.

SOLVED

import Npp

# notepad.open('teste.txt')
lines = editor.getText().split()
current_line_number = 0
res = 0

editor.gotoPos(0)
for i in range (len(lines)):
    editor.searchAnchor()
    res = editor.searchNext(0, 'MIPS')
    if res != -1:
        current_line_number = editor.lineFromPosition(editor.getCurrentPos())
        editor.gotoLine(current_line_number)
        editor.addText(' # ')
        editor.gotoLine(current_line_number + 1)
        editor.searchAnchor()

[Dave Brotherstone]

(Hope you don't mind, I fixed your formatting so it's easier to read)

Whilst this works, it's much more complicated than it needs to be.

There's actually a one line solution to this, but we'll try and stick to your method first.

As you have discovered, searchNext returns -1 when it doesn't find anything. You can actually end the search there. If a line has your search text in twice, you'd actually add the ' # ' in twice, for example. Because the search automatically continues from the last searchAnchor() position, you don't need to worry about splitting the lines up.

The following is a complete script that does the same thing

editor.gotoPos(0)
editor.searchAnchor()
last_found_position = editor.searchNext(0, 'MIPS')
while last_found_position != -1:
    last_found_line = editor.lineFromPosition(last_found_position)
    editor.gotoLine(last_found_line)
    editor.addText(' # ')
    editor.gotoLine(last_found_line + 1)
    editor.searchAnchor()
    last_found_position = editor.searchNext(0, 'MIPS')

This script is more efficient, as it doesn't matter how many lines there are, it just searches through and jumps to the next match.

However, as I mentioned, you can actually peform the whole script in one line, using a regular expression.

editor.rereplace('^.*MIPS.*$', ' # $0')

The explaination:

^ means beginning of the line
.* means any character, any amount of times (including none)
MIPS is your search string
.* again means followed by any character, any amount of times
$ means the end of the line

Then replace with ' # ', followed by $0, which means the whole match.

I hope that helps explain a little.

Cheers,
Dave.