How to use regex in Notepad++ to find and replace all strings of repeating "." that are over a certain size?

Question

I have a document with many lines in this format: text ........ text, I want to replace these strings of '.'s with a single ','.

The regular expression .*. doesn't seem to work, and I'm not sure why. Any suggestions would be great.

Answer 1

Could you try, find by regex: \.+ or \.{2,} And replace by: .

Answer 2

A .*. matches any 0+ chars othert than line breaks and then any char other than a line break.

You need

Find What: \.{4,}
Replace With: ,

The \.{4,} will match 4 or more occurrences of consecutive dots.

Variations:

You may use \h+\K\.+(?=\h) and replace with , if you need to require horizontal whitespace before and after 1+ dots and replace with ,. Here, \h+ matches 1 or more horizontal whitespaces, \K omits these whitespaces from the match, \.+ matches 1 or more dots, and then (?=\h) positive lookahead tries to assert the presence of a horizontal whitespace after the last dot matched.

An equivalent of the above expression is (?<=\h)\.++(?=\h) pattern (where (?<=\h) positive lookahead is used to require a horizontal whitespace).

The same result can be achieved with capturing groups: search for (\h)\.+(\h) and replace with $1,$2.

Note that + (one or more repetitions) in these patterns can also be replaced with the limiting quantifier {min,max}, where max parameter can be missing, just make sure you adjust its values as needed.

Answer 3

You need to escape the dot, because it is a metacharacter which matches any symbol.

You can literally escape it with backslash, like this, \. or use a character class, like this [.].

For replacing sequences of dots of, say, 5 items or more, use [.]{5,}

Note: You can express "one or more x" as x+ instead of x*x to avoid repeating the content of x