Using regular expressions to do mass replace in Notepad++ and Vim

Question

So I\'ve got a big text file which looks like the following:

A
B


        

Answer 1

There is a very simple solution to this unless I have not understood the problem. The following regular expression:

(.*)(>)(.*)

will match the pattern specified in your post.

So, in notepad++ you find (.*)(>)(.*) and replace it with \3.

The regular expressions are basically greedy in the sense that if you specify (.*) it will match the whole line and what you want to do is break it down somehow so that you can extract the string you want to keep. Here, I have done exactly the same and it works fine in Notepad++ and Editplus3.