Lets say i have a document and i want to remove all words that do not contain letter B

how do i do it

thanks

 

I got one of those documents in an email that had no letter b and am trying to find a way to put them back.

 

Maybe highlight all words with the letter B, that should be doable in a text editor, maybe even Word... Then select all the highlighted words, a step that I don't know which software will do, copy and paste, delete the original?

 

if you were using Excel, you could do Conditional Formatting for every cell with a "B" in it, to highlight with any color, then Sort by Color, and delete all of them. Would take you about 30 seconds.

If you were doing it in Word, you could make a very quick vba macro. There are utility programs you can use too. Mass Replacer iirc was decent. That's more for a hex editor type of scenario.

 

The fastest way: you have to create a script.
Long ago I used embedded VB in Office, I think there are similar tools (developer) today.

 

In Windows, you can achieve this using PowerShell commands. Here's an example:

```powershell
(Get-Content "your_file.txt") -replace '\b\w*b\w*\b', '' | Set-Content "output_file.txt"
```

Replace `"your_file.txt"` with the name of your input file and `"output_file.txt"` with the desired output file. This command will remove all words containing the letter 'b' from the text file.

 

Hm, I once wrote a batch script (Windows) that deletes specific words/phrases from a txt file.
I used it to clear up html data/elements to get plain links from some website source.

But I had to define what to delete/replace exactly. This script is also like 12 years old so there could be better methods.

Code:

@echo off & setlocal
pushd "C:\Users\SkyNet\Desktop\Ultra\Batch\replace_txt_content"
set R=%temp%\Replace.vbs
>%R% echo F=WScript.Arguments(0):Set fso=CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject"):T=fso.OpenTextFile(F).ReadAll:fso.CreateTextFile(F).Write Replace(T,"This Word","That Word")
for /f "delims=" %%i in ('dir /b /a-d *.txt') do cscript //nologo %R% "%%i"
popd

This will open any txt document in the "replace_txt_content" folder, scan for "This Word" entries
and replace them with "That Word". When you just add the quotes without content (T,"This Word",""), it'll delete
all entries containing "This Word".

 

notepad++ will do regex find/replace which can do what you want (although learning regex is kind of the worst)

 

Multiple Find and Replace
Required software:

• Find And Replace Multiple Files for Windows

"Find And Replace Multiple Files" is a tool that caters to users who frequently work with text documents, giving them the possibility to seamlessly find and replace text across multiple files at the same time. A simple and intuitive interface split into two areas: files list and typical search - replace boxes where you just enter your keywords.

Command line parameters
In addition to GUI (Graphical User Interface), Find And Replace Multiple Files can also be used from Windows command prompt.
P.S. It can easily be found for "free".

 

Last edited by a moderator: Dec 3, 2023