Delete every other line in notepad++

Question

Is there a way in Notepad++ to delete every other or nth line? I have a massive list of data and I need to reduce the size.

The data itself is not that important and out of a list of 10,000 items I only need a selection of 5,000

Answer 1

I'm not sure Notepad++ is the best tool for this, but using the Power of Regex, we should be able to do it.

Open the replace menu, fill in ([^\n]*\n)[^\n]*\n in the "Find what" box and $1 in the "Replace with" box. Then select regular expression for the search mode, click replace all and every second line is deleted.

You can build similar regexes if you want to do something similar. For example, (([^\n]*\n){a})[^\n]*\n will replace every nth line if you replace a by n - 1 and [^\n]*\n([^\n]*\n) will let you keep even lines instead of odd ones.