Help With Find and Replace

[TIGR]

Real basic question for anyone with experience.

I have a long list of cities and zip codes formatted in the following way:

55472 Abmps
56510 Ada

I need to replace the space between each zip code and its city with a comma, as such:

55472,Abmps
56510,Ada

In the Find and replace dialog, next to find I am using [0-9] [A-Z] to find all instances of a number followed by a space followed by a capital letter. This finds everything I need it to.

But then I intuitively tried, next to replace, using [0-9],[A-Z] and it results in this:

5547[0-9],[A-Z]bmps
5651[0-9],[A-Z]da

How can I tell Notepad++ to leave the zip and city alone while changing the space?

 

[scaminatrix]

There may be a trick you can try:
does the "space" have an Alt code? Like "enter" key combination is Alt+0013.
If you could tell it to find and replace using the Alt code's, that may work.


EDIT:
Space = Alt+32
Comma = Alt+44

 

[TIGR]

I can actually just type in a space next to "find" and that will find all the spaces. The problem with that is that some of the city names are more than a single word. For example "St. Paul".

 

[scaminatrix]

Now that's tricky!
Ok, try this. It's long winded as you'll have to repeat the action 10 times.

Find "0 " and replace with "0," then repeat with other numbers.
"9 " "8 " etc.

EDIT: Unless some of the place names have numbers, it should work. Might have to use the Alt codes still.

2ND EDIT: Just read the OP again, if you find "[0-9] [A-Z]" and replace with "," instead of replacing with "[0-9],[A-Z]", does that do anything different?

 

[TIGR]

That'll get me through this job just fine. I know there's a basic "proper" way of doing this with regex and hope someone will chime in with it for future reference later, but for now I need to get this done.

Thank you much scaminatrix.

 

[scaminatrix]

That's alright mate, which way did you use, the long winded way?

 

[TIGR]

I did it the "long winded way" although really that only took a minute anyway haha so that was just fine.. If I replace [0-9 [A-Z] with just a comma, the comma ends up replacing not only the space but also the last number of each zip and the first letter of each city.

 

[W1zzard]

grab ultraedit and use the regexp search and replace

 

[TIGR]

Thanks W1zzard, trying that out now.

 

[PopcornMachine]

Real basic question for anyone with experience.

I have a long list of cities and zip codes formatted in the following way:

55472 Abmps
56510 Ada

I need to replace the space between each zip code and its city with a comma, as such:

55472,Abmps
56510,Ada

In the Find and replace dialog, next to find I am using [0-9] [A-Z] to find all instances of a number followed by a space followed by a capital letter. This finds everything I need it to.

But then I intuitively tried, next to replace, using [0-9],[A-Z] and it results in this:

5547[0-9],[A-Z]bmps
5651[0-9],[A-Z]da

How can I tell Notepad++ to leave the zip and city alone while changing the space?

Using perl, if the 2 fields are separated by one or more spaces, then

perl -n -e 's/\s+/,/;print' file > newfile

 

[Easy Rhino]

any decent text editor should make it easy for you to find/replace