Wildcard search and replace in Notepad++

Question

I have many documents consisting of text where words hav become incorrectly hyphenated. Like;

be-come; mons-ter; any-thing etc

I can search for the place where this has happened using;

\l-\l

any lowercase character and any other lowercaser character with a '-' in between.

How do I code the replacement to just remove the '-' character ?

Thanks for reading.

Answer 1

Find what: (\l)-(\l)
Replace with: $1$2

Answer 2

• Ctrl+H
• Find what: (?<!-)\b(\l+)-(\l+)\b(?!-)
• Replace with: $1$2
• CHECK Match case
• CHECK Wrap around
• CHECK Regular expression
• Replace all

Explanation:

(?<!-)      # negative lookbehind, make sure we haven't an hyphen before
\b          # word boundary
(\l+)       # group 1, 1 or more small letters
-           # an hyphen
(\l+)       # group 2, 1 or more small letters
\b          # word boundary
(?!-)       # negative lookahead, make sure we haven't an hyphen after

Screenshot (before):

Screenshot (after):