Three moments:

• join array items with | without side spaces
• enclose regex alternation group into parentheses (...|...)
• specify word boundary \b to match a separate words

var removeUselessWords = function(txt) {
    var uselessWordsArray = 
        [
          "a", "at", "be", "can", "cant", "could", "couldnt", 
          "do", "does", "how", "i", "in", "is", "many", "much", "of", 
          "on", "or", "should", "shouldnt", "so", "such", "the", 
          "them", "they", "to", "us",  "we", "what", "who", "why", 
          "with", "wont", "would", "wouldnt", "you"
        ];
			
	  var expStr = uselessWordsArray.join("|");
	  return txt.replace(new RegExp('\\b(' + expStr + ')\\b', 'gi'), ' ')
                    .replace(/\s{2,}/g, ' ');
  }

var str = "The person is going on a walk in the park. The person told us to do what we need to do in the park";
  
console.log(removeUselessWords(str));

I use

bannedWord = ['Good','Bad','Ugly']
toPrint = 'Hello Ugly Guy, Good To See You.'
print(' '.join(i for i in toPrint.split() if i not in bannedWord))

Hi @rowles_2, as @izaychik63 said, you should do it in one line e.g. replace(Replace(col1,“ABC”,""),“123”,"") also you do not need a ; at the end. Beside that it looks fine :slight_smile: Alternatively you can also you two: [image] String Replacer — NodePit Replaces values in string cells if they match a certain wildcard pattern. “If I could use Remove and still use modifiers but that doesn’t appear to be possible” With the regex option in the string replacer node, that should be possible “I have a list of 195 of these words/abbreviations (i.e. Inc, Co, Corp, LLC).” Maybe a recusive loop or a dictionary replace would be better for this many words :thinking: [image] Recursive Loop End — NodePit The loop end node for a recursive loop. This type of loop passes data from the Recursive Loop End node to the Recursive Loop Start node. [image] Dictionary Replacer — NodePit Replaces complete document terms that match with dictionary keys by corresponding specified values.

You say 'comments', so I assume you are using the bulk edit metadata search tab, searching the comments field - correct? If yes, be very careful, this is so powerful it can ruin your library - work on a copy. (If you're not in the bulk edit metadata, but in the Editor, the following should still work.)(And if you are in the main Editor, be careful to limit this to the current file, or marked text, or it will do the entire book.)

That gets tricky, depending on what you mean by a 'line'. A sentence, perhaps defined by 'spaceCapital then some words then Periodspace' ? For that you might try something like:

" [A-Z].*?yourword.*?\. " - without the quotes, they just show the space characters at the ends. Make sure case sensitive is checked. Replace with nothing. (Try with and without the first space - if your sentence starts a paragraph it will have no leading space.)

If a 'line' is actually a paragraph, try a similar thing only with <p>.*?yourword.*?</p> (And if the paragraphs have some class selector you have to include that, like <p class="something">. Look at the html source tab of the comments to see what you actually have.) This might remove several sentences.

But you also say "using the name they start with" - meaning the first word? Yet your example is not that way. If it is indeed the first word, change the string to something like "yourword.*?\. " or <p>yourword.*?</p>

And because this sort of search is VERY wide open, don't do a "replace all" until you are really sure it does what you want and nothing more. Much safer to step through one at a time.

How big is your hitfile exactly? Could you show some actual examples of what you're trying to do? Since you haven't provided more details on your input data, this is just one idea to try out and benchmark against your real data.

Perl regexes are capable of becoming pretty big, and a single regex would allow you to modify the input file in a single pass. Here, I'm using /usr/share/dict/words as an example for building a huge regex, mine has ~99k lines and is ~1MB big.

use warnings;
use strict;
use open qw/:std :encoding(UTF-8)/;

my ($big_regex) = do {
    open my $wfh, '<', '/usr/share/dict/words' or die $!;
    chomp( my @words = <$wfh> );
    map { qr/\b(?:$_)\b/ } join '|', map {quotemeta}
        sort { length $b <=> length $a or $a cmp $b } @words };

while (<>) {
    s/$big_regex//g;
    print;
}

I don't need regex, I only need to compare pure/exact strings against a hash (for speed). i.e. "pine" should not match "pineapple", but it should match "(pine)".

If "pine" should not match "pineapple", you need to check the characters before and after the occurrence of "pine" in the input as well. While certainly possible with fixed string methods, it sounds like the regex concept of word boundaries (\b) is what you're after.

Is there an elegant, high-performance one-liner way ... for my workflow I'd prefer a simple command to my script.

I'm not sure I agree with this sentiment. What's wrong with perl script.pl? You can use it with shell redirections/pipes just like a one-liner. Putting code into a script will unclutter your command line, and allow you to do complex things without trying to jam it all into a one-liner. Plus, short does not necessarily mean fast.

Another reason you might want to use a script is if you have multiple input files. With the code I showed above, building the regex is fairly expensive, so calling the script multiple times will be expensive - processing multiple files in a single script will eliminate that overhead. I love the UNIX principle, but for big data, calling multiple processes (sometimes many times over) and piping data between them is not always the most efficient method, and streamlining it all in a single program can help.

---

Update: As per the comments, enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot 😉 Code that does the same as above in a one-liner:

perl -CDS -ple 'BEGIN{local$/;($r)=map{qr/\b(?:$_)\b/}join"|",map{quotemeta}sort{length$b<=>length$a}split/\n/,<>}s/$r//g' /usr/share/dict/words input.txt

See if this works

=REGEXREPLACE(A1,"\s\b(the|I|It's|as|a|for|on)\b",)

Basically your regex should be like this

string input = @"1H|\^&|||ARCHITECT^8.10^F3453010030^H1P1O1R1C1Q1L1|||Admin||||P|1|20150511083525
    1D";
string pattern = @"([^\w]*Admin[^\w]*)+|[|\\^&\r\n]+";
string replacement = "|";
Regex rgx = new Regex(pattern);
string result = rgx.Replace(input, replacement);