How to find paragraphs not containing at least one of two words?

arunzone · Oct 11, 2014#12014-10-11T08:03+00:00

Hi,

I have groups of data in text file in the below order.

_item 1
_full Author, Name. welcome to our country, saturday, XXX Press
_author Name A.
_title welcome to our country
_other saturday, XXX Airways

_item 2
_full Public College, History of Aliens, 1850, well known event, yyy Press.
_title History of Aliens
_year 1850
_other well known event, yyy Press.
_nonauthor Public College

_item 3
_full New University, History of My Country, 1950, zzz Press.
_title History of My Country
_year 1950
_other New University, zzz Press.

Here item 1 has no issues. Item 2 and item 3 doesn't have authors.

Item 2 has no author so "Public College" has placed as _nonauthor

In item 3 I have to move the "New University" from _other to _nonauthor

So I have to find the group that does not contain _author and _nonauthor. So that I can manually move the text.

Please advice
Arun

Mofi · Oct 11, 2014#22014-10-11T16:50+00:00

Please use first the command Format - Trim Trailing Spaces on this file to make sure that all blank lines are really empty lines.

And you should see DOS in status bar for this file as otherwise the expression below would not work. Convert the file from Unix/Mac to DOS if necessary.

Now you can use a Perl regular expression Find with search string (?s)(?<=\r\n\r\n)(?:.(?!_author)(?!_nonauthor))*?(?=\r\n\r\n) to find paragraphs not containing either the string _author or _nonauthor.

Please note that this expression ignores always first and last paragraph of the file as on first paragraph there are most likely not 2 carriage returns + line-feeds above and on last paragraph there are not 2 carriage returns + line-feeds at end.

arunzone · Oct 13, 2014#32014-10-13T06:35+00:00

Hi, your query worked perfectly. Thanks.