The problem came when I wanted to do the replacement. I drafted a regular expression that would find only what I was looking for. Fortunately all the the “PC” prefixes were intact but the number only entries were not (that data was collected into an Excel file with cells set to the “number” format instead of “text”). First, I knew that the correct format should be something like this: 0# or pc0#.

Rather than scripting the fix I figured notepad++ would do the trick. The problem was that this format was not ready to be inserted into our database. The data was a list of our internal PCs and their serial number. I was working with tabular data that looked something like this: From time to time I would use a regex to search and then replacing everything that was found. When using find and replace in the past I stuck mostly to the basics. I have been using if for years but just recently have come to love the program even more. It’s easy to use, includes syntax coloring for just about anything, folds code nicely and even supports regular expression find and replace features. When scripting or manipulating text data I prefer using notepad++.

Notepad++ regular expression ip address