Duplicate Each Block of Lines Consecutively

Mayonnaisu

Hello everyone, I’ve been trying to find a way to duplicate each block of lines consecutively. The only thing I found so far is to use CTRL+D, but it will be troublesome to use it on a large text file since I have to do it manually for each block. Is there any way to do it at once using Notepad++?

This is the example:

1
line 1
line 1a

2
line 2
line 2a

3
line 3
line 3a

This is the desired result:

1
line 1
line 1a

1
line 1
line 1a

2
line 2
line 2a

2
line 2
line 2a

3
line 3
line 3a

3
line 3
line 3a

PeterJones

@Mayonnaisu said in Duplicate Each Block of Lines Consecutively:

Thanks for using code blocks. it made it easy to copy/paste and test the regex.

The simplest would be to use FIND = (?s)^.*?\R\R , replace = $0$0 with regular-expression mode – that allows . to match newlines, and finds the shortest sequence that has two newlines in a row (the \R\R).
But unless you had two blank lines after the 3rd group, that wouldn’t work for the third group.

Some experimenting showed that the most reliable was FIND = (?s)^(.*?)(\R)(\R|\Z) and REPLACE = $1$2$2$1$2$2 – that way, there doesn’t have to be two blank lines (though there does need to be a newline after the third group).

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Mayonnaisu

@PeterJones Thanks for the solution! I really appreciate that. So it turns out that I can use regex to do it. I’m embarassed that my regex skill hasn’t improved much. It seems to decline instead after long hiatus. If time allows, I want to relearn it so that I don’t have to keep asking here.