RegEx Magic

You can download a free trial version of RegEx Magic here . It's utility which assists you with generating Regex searches from sample text that you provide. In this example you can see that a Regex search has been created based on a few date samples that I have entered:

The drop down menu on the top left allows you to select between various RegEx flavors so you can run the search in C++, Java, Python, Powershell, PowerGrep and other applications.

Regex to replace multiple blank spaces

A common problem when editing text is to come across a file that has characters separated with differing numbers of blank spaces. If you want to pull the text together so there's only one blank space between each word you can run a simple Regular Expression search.

Using a text editor like NotePad++ simply enter " +" - two blank spaces followed by the plus sign, and replace this with one blank space.

So text that looks like this:

. . . . get changed to this:

Search for string which is not part of a longer string

Here's another way to search for a string which does not fall within a longer string:

\b[0-9]{7}-[0-9]{3}\b

Use the \b operators around your Regex search to make sure that it appear by itself and not within other alphanumeric characters.