Change First Name SPACE Last Name to First Initial Last Name

[Bill Walker]

Example:  Change  John Doe to JDoe

[Neil Faiman]

The good people on this mailing list delight in helping other users solve problems, but before they can help solve a problem, the problem has to be well defined.

I’m guessing that you have one or more files containing one or more two-word names that you want to transform, But how are the names that are to be transformed distinguished from all the other word pairs in your files?` That is the key question, and there isn’t even a hint at an answer in your problem statement.

Regards,
Neil Faiman

[Kjetil Rå Hauge]

Try this:
- Click Case sensitive and Grep
- Find: "([A-Z])([a-z]+.) ([A-Z][a-z]+)."
- Replace: "\1\3\4 "
________________________________________
From: bbe...@googlegroups.com <bbe...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Bill Walker <bwa...@cleanair.com>
Sent: 09 October 2023 04:32
To: BBEdit Talk
Subject: Change First Name SPACE Last Name to First Initial Last Name

Example: Change John Doe to JDoe

--

[Benjamin Irwin]

That's cool but I had to move one of the periods inside the ")" as follows.

Find:  ([A-Z])([a-z]+.) ([A-Z][a-z]+.)

Replace:  \1\3\4

[Tim A]

Find:         ([A-Z])([a-z]+.) ([A-Z][a-z]+.)

Replace:   \1\3\4

Why the "+."?     Isn't the space between first and last name all that is needed?

And what is \4   mean with only three captures?

[Bruce Van Allen]

The ‘+’ is quantifying a character class '[a-z]’.

‘[a-z]+’ (without the quotes) means one or more characters in the range ‘a’ to ‘z’.

The ‘.’ just adds one more character, and isn’t needed.

And Tim is correct that there’s no fourth capture, so the ‘\4' is meaningless.

— Bruce

_bruce__van_allen__santa_cruz_ca_

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[Tim A]

[a-z]+           so  this will match all the lower case letters in the first name

The ‘.’ just adds one more character, and isn’t needed." 

         - but here wouldn't it match the presumed space character between First and Last name?

... So why then can it successfully match the space character as demanded by the regular expression? Hasn't it been "used up" by the period?

[Bruce Van Allen]

That ‘.’ doesn’t match the space character between first and last because that space character is in the pattern.

([A-Z])([a-z]+.) ([A-Z][a-z]+.)

^

So that ‘.’ would just be matching the last character of the first name.

HTH

— Bruce

_bruce__van_allen__santa_cruz_ca_





On Oct 10, 2023, at 4:20 PM, Tim A <timaa...@gmail.com> wrote:

([AZ])([az]+.) ([AZ][az]+.)

[a-z]+’ so this will match all the lower case letters in the first name

The ‘.’ just adds one more character, and isn’t needed." - but here would match the presumed space character between First and Last name

... So why does then successfully match the space character as demanded by the regular expression? Hasn't it been "used up" by the period?

On Tuesday, October 10, 2023 at 2:41:42 PM UTC-7 Bruce Van Allen wrote:

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bbedit/8d7a1a3c-938b-4989-9ea0-48dfc4f65dd9n%40googlegroups.com.

[Bruce Van Allen]

Hmm, that carat ^ should have been under the spacebar space.

Anyway, to further explain: at first the regex engine will indeed match that spacebar space with the dot ‘.’. But then it comes to the actual spacebar space in the pattern, but there isn’t one left, so the regex engine backs up, matches the dot to the last character before the space, matches the space, and moves on.

> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bbedit/A3DDF538-CD8E-40C9-8DDE-6C8432DC0319%40cruzio.com.

[Tim A]

Thanks for the deeper explanation.  Learned something.

The Ways of the Engine can be mysterious. 

[Dim]

Check this one (allowing for -, ', and some accented characters):

Find: ([A-ZÀ-ÿ])\w+(-[A-ZÀ-ÿ])*\w*\b\W+([-'\w]+)\b

Replace: \1\2\3