So I have a text file in Vscode that contains several lines of text like so:
1801: Joseph Marie Jacquard, a French merchant and inventor invent a loom that uses punched wooden cards to automatically weave fabric designs. Early computers would use similar punch cards.
So now I'm trying to isolate the year number/the first 4 characters of each line. I'm new to regex, and I know how to get the first 4 characters (I used ^.{4}) but how would I be able to find all EXCEPT for the first 4 characters so that I can replace them with nothing and be left with just the year numbers?
CodePudding user response：
Find: (?<=^\d{4}).*
Replace: with nothing
(?<=^\d{4}) if a line starts ^ with 4 digits , (?<=...) is a positive lookbehind
.* match everything else up to line terminators, so the : will be included in the match
Since you never matched the 4 digits, a lookbehind/lookahead isn't part of any match necessarily, that you want to keep, you don't have to worry about any capture groups or replacements.
CodePudding user response：
You can
Find: ^(.{4}).
Replace: $1
See the regex demo. Details:
^- start of a line (in Visual Studio Code,^matches any line start)(.{4})- capturing group #1 that captures any four chars other than line break chars.- one or more chars other than line break chars, as many as possible.
The $1 backreference in the replacement pattern replaces the match with Group 1 value.