Replace given char with ASCII nul in Notepad++

Question

I tried extended search --> replace with \0, but it does not seem to work. Instead it deletes all occurrences of the character. Could it be a bug?

NB: replacing with \n, \r\n and the like works in extended search.

I am using Notepad++ 6.4.1 Unicode.

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited Mar 20 '17 at 10:17

Searches on the internet showed that inserting NUL in Notepad++ is non-trivial, for example see How to Insert a Null Character (ASCII 00) in Notepad?

A hackish way to replace given character/characters with NUL is via the Hex Editor Plugin^†.

Go to hex mode (via Plugins → HEX-Editor → View in HEX, or Ctrl+Alt+Shift+H)
Highlight the character(s) you want to replace.
- You can either highlight it in the "Dump" column or in the "0 | 1 | ... | f" column.
Ctrl+H to bring up the Replace menu.
- Change "Data type" to "Hexadecimal".
- The character(s) you highlighted will show up under "Find what" (as a hex string)
- Enter "00" in the "Replace with" field (that is a null byte)
Press "Replace" or "Replace all".

Disclaimer: I've heard from somewhere that the Hex Editor plugin is buggy but I've only used it occasionally in the past (it worked alright but your mileage may vary) so I don't really know the extent of its bugginess.

^† _{You can install it via Notepad++'s Plugin Manager (Plugins → Plugin Manager → Show Plugin Manager) but you might need to check "Show unstable plugins" under Plugin Manager's "Settings" for the plugin to show up}

Karan · Answer 2 · 2013-07-07T21:55:56.587

1

Try \d### (where # is a single digit in the 0-9 range).

See Escape sequences supported in extended mode for more.

Edit: Looks like \d, \u, \x etc. don't work properly when it comes to replacing with the NUL character. Search works fine (I inserted a few NULs using a hex editor), but replace doesn't and simply deletes the characters.

edited Jul 07 '13 at 21:55

answered Jul 07 '13 at 21:14

Karan

57,289

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 07 '13 at 22:10

As far as I know Notepad++ has always had issues with inserting 0-characters.
Notepad++ is no exception: Most editors can't deal properly with it.
It is not really surprising. Dealing with 0-characters is quite a niche application.

The only Windows editor that I am aware of that can handle 0's as any other character is UltraEdit.
(And it has an hex-edit mode as well, so one way or another you can get the job done with it.)

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 20 '17 at 10:17

1

Reported it as a bug here - please comment there in hope it's fixed - looks like a possible can of worms to me.

References :

edited Mar 20 '17 at 10:17

Community

1

answered Nov 03 '13 at 12:29

Mr_and_Mrs_D

856

score 0 · Answer 5 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:41

How to insert any byte value into a text:

Npp -> Plugins -> Python Script -> New Script
Select where to save ... and give the name insert a byte (say)

in opened Npp doc insert this code:

    s= notepad.prompt('Enter value, or series, in a box, e.g.: \x5Cx00 ','Insert a byte ')
    exec("a=b'{}'".format(s))
    editor.addText(a)

Save.
Restart Npp
Then you must see own script under menu:
Npp -> Plugins -> Python Script -> Script -> insert a byte
If you want shortcut for this, please see how to: Wrap Text with Quotation Marks in Notepad++

Replace given char with ASCII nul in Notepad++

5 Answers5

How to insert any byte value into a text: