regex - Find lines not starting with " in Notepad++

Question

I try to verify a CSV file where we had problems with line breaks.

I want to find all lines not starting with a ".

I am trying with /!^"/gim but the ! negation is not working.

How can I negate /^"/gim properly?

Answer 1

In regex, the ! does not mean negation; instead, you want to negate a character set with [^"]. The brackets, [], denote a character set and if it starts with a ^ that means "not this character set".

So, if you wanted to match things that are not double-quotes, you would use [^"]; if you don't want to match any quotes, you could use [^"'], etc.

With Notepad++, you should be able to search with the following to find lines that don't start with the " character:

^[^"]

If you want to highlight the full line, use:

^[^"].*