Notepad++ Search and Replace with Multiple Lines, Lookahead, Wildcard Issues? - search

Question

I have a tricky problem. I need to make a minor change to a large number of xml files (500+). The change involves switching a value from 'false' to 'true.' The line that needs to change looks like this:
<VoltageIsMeasuredLineLine>false</VoltageIsMeasuredLineLine>
And it needs to become:
<VoltageIsMeasuredLineLine>true</VoltageIsMeasuredLineLine>
Unfortunately there are numerous instances of this set of tags in each file, so we can't do a simple find and replace. The thing that makes this set of tags unique is that they come some lines after:
<CID>STATIONNAME.BUS.STATIONNAME.DKV</CID>
However, each file has a different station name, so I had used wildcards to filter them out.
<CID>.*.BUS.*.DKV</CID>
So the code looks like this:
<CID>STATIONNAME.BUS.STATIONNAME.DKV</CID>
<tag>Some Number of Other lines</tag>
<tag>Some Number of Other lines</tag>
<tag>Some Number of Other lines</tag>
<VoltageIsMeasuredLineLine>false</VoltageIsMeasuredLineLine>
And other sections in the code look like:
<CID>STATIONNAME.COLR.STATIONNAME.FCLR</CID>
<tag>Some Number of Other lines</tag>
<tag>Some Number of Other lines</tag>
<tag>Some Number of Other lines</tag>
<VoltageIsMeasuredLineLine>false</VoltageIsMeasuredLineLine>
So I'm using the CID .BUS .DKV line as a starting point. Basically I need to change the first occurance of the VoltageisMeasured line that comes directly AFTER the CID .BUS .DKV line. But there's a lot of other lines in between (none of which are consistent from file to file) that I don't care about and are messing up my search.
I was suggested to try a Lookahead, but it did not work. This it the code I was told to try:
(?!<CID>.*.BUS.*.DKV</CID>(.*?)<VoltageIsMeasuredLineLine>false</VoltageIsMeasuredLineLine>
Hower, that line is also returning the lines without .BUS and .DKV, which are the really important factors in determining this section's uniqueness. How can I modify this Lookahead so that it only returns sections that had the .BUS and .DKV in the CID part?
Another idea I had was to select everything in between the CID and Voltage parts, keep the selections in groups, and then print the first two groups as-is, and replace the third. Like this:
(<CID>.*.BUS.*.DKV</CID>)(.*)(<VoltageIsMeasuredLineLine>false</VoltageIsMeasuredLineLine>)
And replace with
\1\2<VoltageIsMeasuredLineLine>true</VoltageIsMeasuredLineLine>
But something is still wrong with the CID part. I'm sure these wildcards are part of the problem but I've hit a wall. Any help appreciated!

Answer 1

Try the following in Notepad++ (Version >= 6.0) with replace
Activate Option matches newline and
set in Find what:
(<CID>[A-Za-z\.]*BUS[A-Za-z\.]*</CID>.*?<VoltageIsMeasuredLineLine>)false
and in Replace with:
\1true
The assumption is that every STATIONNAME.BUS.STATIONNAME.DKV has one corresponding VoltageIsMeasuredLineLine (as I read from your question)
The trick is, to use greedy search. I look for the first VoltageIsMeasuredLineLine after VoltageIsMeasuredLineLine