Help with line breaks mid-string - (Moved)

[alkado]

So I am looking at a relatively simple albeit long script I need to compile, however it has been left as practically deprecated and I want to get it working.

Now, the lines I need to work with are way over the character limit, and I'm seeing the lines broken up mid-string. Example from part of an array attached.

I simply want to use a find/replace on the many instances of ' & ' with something that works, as this doesn't break the line the way I need it to, and thus I cannot compile it. I'm aware of manual ways to do this between strings of data, but I am dealing with a lot of code and would much rather make use these breaks as it would turn days of work into maybe an hour. I know that there's a chance that it simply cant be this easy, but I figured the least I could do is ask.

Forgive me if this sounds stupid but this is not my area of expertise by any means.

demo.txt

[Jos]

Moved to the appropriate forum.

Moderation Team

[Jos]

So the attached txt file is one line from your script that isn't working ....right?

Just change the 

xxxx' & 'yyyy

in that script to 

xxxx' & _ 
'yyyy

and things will work.

[Nine]

You can use Notepad++ to perform a global replacement in extended mode :

' & '

with

' & _\r\n'

 

[Jos]

Just now, Nine said:

You can use Notepad++

Or SciTE  

[Nine]

Just now, Jos said:

Or SciTE

Really? how?  reading the help file, it says that \r\n are not supported in Scintilla !

[Jos]

2 minutes ago, Nine said:

how?

This is SciTE functionality not Scintilla.

Edited February 13, 2022 by Jos

[Nine]

Oh, nice.  I was trying with Regular expression...

[Jos]

2 minutes ago, Nine said:

I was trying with Regular expression

That actually also works:

[Nine]

Quote

• \a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t, \v match the corresponding C escape char, respectively BEL, BS, FF, LF, CR, TAB and VT;
  Note that \r and \n are never matched because in Scintilla, regular expression searches are made line per line (stripped of end-of-line chars).

That's what mingled me...I was trying to search first and it was not working.  Never really tried with just a replacement.

Thanks Scite guru 

[Jos]

I normally use the first option when just replacing tabs/CRs/LFs to keep things simple and not having to worry about any special regex characters, but it is quite useful ones you get the hang of it.   

[ad777]

@alkado

this should works for you i did little fix:

demo.txt

[Jos]

24 minutes ago, ad777 said:

this should works for you i did little fix:

What exactly was wrong with what we gave as solution ?   ...   and why such a complex alternative when standard concatenation spread over multiple lines works fine as well?

[ad777]

@Jos

i give him just another solution,that all.

[Jos]

I know but:

1. The question whether this is really needed or just creating confusion?
2. Your proposed solution as such is not one I would advice to use in general as I mentioned.

Just putting it out there..... but you don't have to provide a solution in every posted thread.  

[alkado]

Thanks for the quick and useful answers! All of your answers can help me out since I'm newer here, I just feel a little silly that the solution was that simple.

And mods, thanks for moving this to the right place, forgive my ignorance.

 

[alkado]

Just to add. I love me some Notepad++, but its handy ability to keep files open in memory even if not saved has its usefulness reserved elsewhere for me.

I use Atom for projects like this, a very handy program, and it is also capable of regex find and replace.

[alkado]

And, because I cant keep my thoughts organized, I'll add on this here third post that the code I'm dealing with is over 74,000 lines long, so any solution that bypasses having to manually enter even a single character outside of the replace tool is just not realistic seeing that I have that option to choose from already.