Web Development Archives - Page 5 of 5

TextPad is a great editor, been using it for years, but never really used it to it’s full potential. Recently I needed to do some find/replace work in some huge SQL and CSV files – huge enough to make manual editing impossible – so I had to start using Textpad’s Regular Expression capabilities.

Here are a few expressions that came in handy. I intend to add to this list as time goes on.
Regexp shown in Green, my comments in Red:

CSV Editing:

Remove spaces and tab characters at the beginning of a line:
Find what: ^[ t]+ Replace With: don't enter anything in the field
Remove spaces and tab characters at the end of a line:
Find what: [ t]+$ Replace With: don't enter anything in the field
Add “Hello” to the beginning of every line:
Find what: (^.*) Replace With: Hello 1
Add “Hello ” to the beginning and ” World” to the end of every line:
Find what: (^.*) Replace With: Hello 1 World (watch the spaces)
Find empty fields (i.e. “, ,”) with spaces or tabs in, and replace with empty field (“,,”):
Find what: ,[ t*], Replace With: ,, (just that, nothing else, just 2 commas)
Remove blank lines in a text file, by searching for two linebreaks next to each other, and replacing with one:
Find what: nn Replace With: n

Replacement Expressions:

Extract email addresses only from the following text: “Joe Blogs (job.blogs@blogsworld.com)”
This expression searches for 2 tagged expressions, firstly any printable characters including spaces up to the first open bracket symbol, secondly anything between the brackets. It then replaces the whole line with the second match.
Find what: ^([[:graph:] ]+)(([[:graph:] ]+)) Replace With: 2

Submitted by Paul: “Here’s how to convert csv to xml with a (quite large) regexp you can alter/extend for your needs.”
Find what: ^"([[:print:]]+)","([[:print:]]+)","([[:print:]]+)" Replace With: 123

Notes:

The expressions above need the ‘Regular Expression’ condition to be ticked in the Find or Replace dialogue boxes for them to work.
Text pad needs to be set to use UNIX not POSIX style expressions. To set this, open ‘Configure > Preferences’ (Ctrl+Q,P), find the ‘Editor’ settings, and untick the ‘Use POSIX regular expression syntax’ box.

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Solution

Try the following CSS in your stylesheet or page head:

#cdiv {
  position:absolute; /* important. */
  left:50%; /*important if you want it absolutely centred in window. */ 
  margin-left:-50px; /* importnant. must be half the width. */
  width:100px; /* set to your requirements, but remember left margin setting. */
  height:100px; /* not neccessary if the element needs to grow with content. */
  border:1px solid #ABF; /* not important. */
  background-color:#DDF; /* not important. */
  text-align:center; /*not important. */
}

… and now set the ID of the element you want centered to ‘cdiv’. If the item you want to centre is an image, remember to add display:block; to the style (this makes it act like a block level element).

This style works perfectly (by my testing, but I’m not perfect) on:

Internet Explorer 6, 7 & 8+

Firefox 2.*+

Opera 8 & 9+

Google Chrome (all versions)

Safari (Mac and PC versions)

Netscape 9 (is anyone still using this?)

Any problems, please post a question or comment below.

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Category: Web Development

Textpad Regular Expressions

Centre and float a div over page content with CSS – no hacks, cross browser

Problem

Solution