for instance, i want to find all text strings that match:

date="1535218094566" type="2" subject="null" body

and replace with a blank space.

however, that date value changes on each line.

any way to do that?

Notepad++
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37742519/notepad-wildcard

Using the replace function:
Find what: date=".*" type="2" subject="null" body
Replace with: date=" " type="2" subject="null" body (or whatever you want to replace with)

Search Mode set to Regular expression

thanks. i was doing this in notepad++ anyways. Thanks.

period asterisk?

doesnt seem to be working.

ok, so ".*" will make it search for the wildcard after the string, and asterisk will take it to the end of the line. anyway to have it re-recognize a text string and not go towards the end of the line?

Works for me.

".*" should match everything within the first set of quotes in this case.

Make sure you don't have the ". matches newline" box checked.

I couldnt get it to work.

line to replace
----- date="1535218094566" type="2" subject="null" body ----

if i did Find date=".*" type="2" subject="null" body
it wouldnt find anything.

if i did Find date=".*
it would return date= and the entire remainder of the line



i ended up forcing it to work, because luckily the date variable was a constant 13 characters long.

so i did Find date="............." type="2" subject="null" body

not sure what was going on, but you helped nonetheless. i wouldnt have gotten there without the spur.

Glad you got it working

emacs