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regexnotepad++

Regex in Notepad++ to get the resource keys

I need help to come up with a regular expression for cleaning the aspx page entries.

....
Line 24: <asp:Button ID="id1" runat="server" meta:resourceKey="ButtonTxt"/>
Line 35: <asp:Label ID="id2" runat="server" meta:resourceKey="Name"></asp:Label>
Line 47: <asp:Label ID="id3" runat="server" meta:resourcekey="Other_Name"></asp:Label>
....

How do I write the regular expression to extract only meta:resourceKey="ButtonTxt", meta:resourceKey="Name", meta:resourcekey="Other_Name" and so on. Basically I need to extract only the meta:resourcekey="xxxx" strings.

I tried .*?(meta:.*?").* but this gets only till the first ".

Solution

  • You used the ? qualifier to turn the *-quantifier before the " non-greedy (or "lazy"). This means it will match as little as possible with the given pattern. That is why this quantifier matches only until the first ". The rest is covered by the .* that follows your match group.

    If you remove the ? the *-quantifier matches greedy (which is the default behavior). A greedy quantifier will match as much as possible, which in your case is the second ".

    You can see the difference here: https://regex101.com/r/IgA15K/1

    And there is some documentation on the concept: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/base-types/quantifiers-in-regular-expressions#greedy-and-lazy-quantifiers