RegEx Select & Wrap URLs /w Angle Brackets Functionality

[alienfxfiend]

RegEx Select & Wrap URLs /w Angle Brackets Functionality

[alankilborn]

I want to add a prefix -= and suffix =- to each multi-selected words

As N++ doesn't support multiselected text as the result of a search, the way to achieve something like that is doing a replace instead, where you add in the -= / =- (or whatever) delimiters as part of the Replace with text expression.

[molsonkiko]

Before claiming that any regex implementation lacks the capability to do X, you should learn about the capabilities of the regex engine and fully articulate what you want, including examples of things that should and should not match your regex.

Until you provide some examples, nobody is going to be inclined to give you any assistance beyond recommending that you read the documentation.

[alankilborn]

Until you provide some examples

...which would have taken care of itself if @alienfxfiend had submitted an issue using the issue template.

Suggest closing this issue until such is provided.

[alienfxfiend]

Oh sorry, I cannot use this RegEx select: (http://[^\s]+) to Replace links into this (add wrapping Angle Brackets surrounding it): <$1> (it only selects the first occurrence, (& I remember reading about how NPP does not support this kind of multi-selects (I think, in an AI model prompt)).)

[molsonkiko]

@alienfxfiend

Don't ask large language models (LLMs) about Notepad++. They will mostly tell you lies. This is because there just isn't enough true information about Notepad++ in their training data.

I would also discourage using LLMs for regex. There are better sources; I think StackOverflow is better. It is still useful to learn how regular expressions work, so that if you find a regular expression that doesn't work for you, you can modify it to make it work better. In your example, (http://[^\s]+) only matches URLs with the http protocol, whereas you probably want to match the https protocol as well.

In any case, a quick DuckDuckGo search for url match regex turned up this StackOverflow post, from which I got a regular expression that I modified slightly to (?-i)https?://(www\.)?[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%._\+~#=]{1,256}\.[a-zA-Z0-9()]{1,6}\b([-a-zA-Z0-9()@:%_\+.~#?&//=]*)

Also, you don't need to wrap the regular expression in grouping parentheses in Notepad++. If you want to wrap some text in (), you can just regex-replace some text with (${0}), because Notepad++ supports backreferences to the entire captured string as ${0}.

[alienfxfiend]

Apologies, I was addressing the wrong issue. So I have a list of words & I want to add a prefix -= and suffix =- to each multi-selected words, but the "In Selection" in the "Replace" dialog grays out the option. The result is every word in the current document gets the delimiters -= & =- .I need NPP to allow me to add prefix -= & suffix =- to multiple selections of words among a text. I used this RegEx: \b(\w+)\b & replaced with: -=$1=- .This is why I said NPP doesn't have this functionality. Links can be wrapped in Angle-Brackets but multiple words among many cannot using RegEx ! Please try to fix this in the future. For example:
These words:

1. Agitated 2. Curmudgeon 3. Plankton
   I select Curmudgeon & Plankton (Ctrl+double-click both) then Ctrl+H Replace dialog, the "In Selection" is grayed out. I need to be able to apply multiple-wrapped-prefix\suffix to words to only multiple dispersed selected words —should look like this:
2. Agitated 2. -=Curmudgeon=- 3. -=Plankton=-
   But the whole document's words are replaced. If there's another RegEx to do this let me know (this is the limitation the AI was speaking of.)
   P.S: More importantly, there's no way to apply this RegEx if it's more than one word!!!
   P.P.S: The problem appears to be I cannot apply a phrase to wrap (.*) and then use the same Replace RegEx on a word \b(\w+)\b Could this be fixed?

[alienfxfiend]

O.K. I got it all sorted, thank you. Sorry for the bewildering lengthy posts /w so many issues being listed. In the end, Notepad++ has a robust solution to these problems !