Notepad++ incrementally replace

Travyguy9 picture Travyguy9 · Sep 29, 2011 · Viewed 108.6k times · Source

Lets say I want to have a 10 rows of data but I want a value to increment for each row or piece of data. How do I increment that value?

For example....If I have these rows, is there a regex way of replacing the id values to increment?

<row id="1" />
<row id="1" />
<row id="1" />
<row id="1" />
<row id="1" />

--- Here is what I would like it to look like... (if the first row's id goes up one thats ok)

<row id="1" />
<row id="2" />
<row id="3" />
<row id="4" />
<row id="5" />

Answer

voithos picture voithos · Sep 29, 2011

Not sure about regex, but there is a way for you to do this in Notepad++, although it isn't very flexible.

In the example that you gave, hold Alt and select the column of numbers that you wish to change. Then go to Edit->Column Editor and select the Number to Insert radio button in the window that appears. Then specify your initial number and increment, and hit OK. It should write out the incremented numbers.

Note: this also works with the Multi-editing feature (selecting several locations while maintaining Ctrl key pressed).

This is, however, not anywhere near the flexibility that most people would find useful. Notepad++ is great, but if you want a truly powerful editor that can do things like this with ease, I'd say use Vim.