I am trying to replace white space in lines with text and forward slashes with commas without having a trailing comma on the end of the line.
I am using a text editor with separate find and replace strings.
the input looks like this (a few of the different variables):
CATEGORIES:ORION/AKC Collection accounts receivable White Plains
CATEGORIES:ABITIBIBOWATER/NOA1 ENRON/NOA PAPERCO/CL DWA
CATEGORIES:ONSITE FAO
CATEGORIES:LAR-DAN Lar-Dan
the results should be:
CATEGORIES:ORION/AKC,Collection,accounts,receivable,White,Plains
CATEGORIES:ABITIBIBOWATER/NOA1,ENRON/NOA,PAPERCO/CL,DWA
CATEGORIES:ONSITE,FAO
CATEGORIES:LAR-DAN,Lar-Dan
I tried:
CATEGORIES:([A-Z|a-z])*
but it only gets me the first expression
CATEGORIES:ORION (in the first example.
The regex your tried CATEGORIES:([A-Z|a-z])* Matches CATEGORIES: followed by a capturing group repeated zero or more times with the ranges a-z and A-Z and also a | because they are in a character class. That would for example also match CATEGORIES:ONSITE||
what you might do is match CATEGORIES in a capturing group and use \G to get a iterative match where you capturing not a whitespace characters in the second capturing group followed by matching one or more times a space where the end of the string $ does not follow.
(CATEGORIES:|\G(?!^))(\S+)[ ]+(?!$)
And replace with the 2 capturing groups followed by a comma
$1$2,