How to delete characters from the beginning of a line to a specific character in Notepad++

In this article, we will discuss how to delete characters from the beginning of a line to a specific character in Notepad++. Notepad++ Download

Enabling regular expression mode

To use regular expressions in Notepad++, you need to enable this mode in the Find and Replace dialog. Do the following:

Open the file by selecting File > Open and choose the desired file.
Press Ctrl+H to open the Find and Replace dialog.
At the bottom of the dialog, set the switch to Regular expression mode.

Writing the regular expression

To delete characters from the beginning of a line to a specific character, you need to write the correct regular expression. For example, if you want to delete all characters from the beginning of a line to a colon (:), the regular expression will look like this:

^.*?:

Explanation of the regular expression:

^ — beginning of the line.
.*? — any character (except a newline) repeated 0 or more times, but as few as possible (lazy quantifier).
: — colon character.

Now that the regular expression is written, you can apply it to delete characters:

In the Find field, enter the regular expression:
```
^.*?:
```
Leave the Replace with field empty, as we want to delete the found characters.
Click the Replace All button to replace all occurrences in the file.

Usage examples

To delete text from the beginning of a line to the @ character, use the regular expression:
```
^.*?@
```
To delete text from the beginning of a line to the # character, use the regular expression:
```
^.*?#
```

Using the described steps, you can delete characters from the beginning of a line to a specific character.