Find and deletes lines

[CrispyBacon]

Hi Guys,

Is there way to delete an entire line from the entire file.
I'm editing an epub, and I want to delete every line 14 from the entire book.

And is there a way to delete
<p> Chapter 123: Random Chapter Name </p>
<p> Chapter 124: Random Chapter Name </p>
<p> Chapter 125: Random Chapter Name </p>

all in one go. Instead of going to each chapter and deleting that line.

Sorry, I cant think of a better way to explain it

[Turtle91]

What you are looking for is called a regular expression, or Regex. The basics of Regex-ese is fairly simple and straightforward. Don't get alarmed by some of the more advanced stuff, you (almost) never need the super advanced stuff.

For your Chapter example, I would use:

Find: <p>\s*Chapter (\d+): (.*?)\s*</p>
Replace: [leave blank]

Make sure you have Regex as the Mode and then I would just do them one at a time until you are confident you got them all.

FYI the funny codes are simply wildcards:

<p>\s*Chapter (\d+): (.*?)\s*</p>

\s* means any (or none) blank spaces
(\d+) means any group of 1, or more, numerical digits
(.*?) means any group of characters before stopping at any space before the </p>

You can find much more in-depth explanation and examples on Regex in the MR Wiki and by doing a search of the threads.

<--->

I'm not aware of a way to select "line 14" and delete it, but if it has a consistent formatting or something that you can use the regex search to find then I'd use that.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

<snip>

I'm not aware of a way to select "line 14" and delete it, but if it has a consistent formatting or something that you can use the regex search to find then I'd use that.

If the line 14s don't have any consistently unique content that is regex-able, unzip the epub, then use a script to process the relevant files (e.g. *.html) thru a line editor such as sed or edlin, then zip up the folder and rename as a .epub.

BR

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

I'm not aware of a way to select "line 14" and delete it, but if it has a consistent formatting or something that you can use the regex search to find then I'd use that.

Can't be done with a regex, but can be easily done with a throwaway plugin.

Spoiler:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import sys, os

def run(bk):
    for html_id, href in bk.text_iter():
        html = bk.readfile(html_id)
        text = html.splitlines()
        if len(text) > 13:
            value = text[13]
            text.remove(value)
            bk.writefile(html_id, "\r\n".join(text))
            print('{} deleted from {}'.format(value, os.path.basename(href)))

    return 0

def main():
    print('I reached main when I should not have\n')
    return -1

if __name__ == "__main__":
    sys.exit(main())

The line number is hard-coded in the following line:

            value = text[13]

which obviously needs to be changed for other line numbers. Since Python uses zero-based indexing, the OP'll need to subtract 1 from the line number (text[13] refers to line 14).

[Turtle91]

Awesome - I'm continually amazed at the level of genius-ery that exists around here!!

I think the next step would be to create a plugin that write's plugin's to order.... anyone want to be a bazillionair???

[CrispyBacon]

Thanks Guys!