Find and replace with asterisk character

Question

This is not really a programming question, I just have an XML file like this:

<product>
    <id>123</id>
</product>
<product>
    <id>245</id>
</product>
<product>
    <id>356</id>
</product>

I want to find all id's and replace them with just one "0". As ID's are different, I cannot use notepad++ because it can't find like <id>*</id> so how can I do it? The file is really long.

Answer 1

Note: Answering as per the XML structure given.

Use Notepad++ Regular expression and replace \d+ with 0.

Answer 2

You can replace the tag content even in Notepad++ with a Regex-based find&replace:

Search:

<id>[^<>]+</id>

and replace it with:

<id>0</id>

This should be the find and replace window (remember to enable "Regular Expression"):

XML before replacing:

XML after replacing:

Answer 3

Use an XML-aware tool to process XML. For example, in xsh you can just write

open file.xml ;
for //product/id set text() 0 ;
save :b ;