Notepad++ incrementally replace

Question

Lets say I want to have a 10 rows of data but I want a value to increment for each row or piece of data. How do I increment that value?

For example....If I have these rows, is there a regex way of replacing the id values to increment?

<row id="1" /> <row id="1" /> <row id="1" /> <row id="1" /> <row id="1" /> 

--- Here is what I would like it to look like... (if the first row's id goes up one thats ok)

<row id="1" /> <row id="2" /> <row id="3" /> <row id="4" /> <row id="5" /> 

Answer 1

Not sure about regex, but there is a way for you to do this in Notepad++, although it isn't very flexible.

In the example that you gave, hold Alt and select the column of numbers that you wish to change. Then go to Edit->Column Editor and select the Number to Insert radio button in the window that appears. Then specify your initial number and increment, and hit OK. It should write out the incremented numbers.

Note: this also works with the Multi-editing feature (selecting several locations while maintaining Ctrl key pressed).

This is, however, not anywhere near the flexibility that most people would find useful. Notepad++ is great, but if you want a truly powerful editor that can do things like this with ease, I'd say use Vim.

Answer 2

I was looking for the same feature today but couldn't do this in Notepad++. However, we have TextPad to our rescue. It worked for me.

In TextPad's replace dialog, turn on regex; then you could try replacing

<row id="1"/> 

by

<row id="\i"/> 

Have a look at this link for further amazing replace features of TextPad - http://sublimetext.userecho.com/topic/106519-generate-a-sequence-of-numbers-increment-replace/