Removing the numbers from a numbered list is pretty easy with regular expressions.
For my KFOG site, many of my playlists started out with numbers, like this:
1. Steely Dan - Reeling in the Years
2. Neil Young - Are You Ready for the Country
(News: Munich)
3. Bill Withers - Lean on Me
4. The Stylistics - Betcha By Golly, Wow
(TV: The Paul Lynde Show)
5. Jimmy Cliff - You Can Get it if You Really Want
6. The Raspberries - I Wanna Be With You
(Movie: Cabaret)
7. David Bowie - Moonage Daydream)
8. Yes - Roundabout
(Ian Anderson Interview)
9. Jethro Tull - Thick as a Brick (BOS)
10. Faces - Stay With Me
To remove them, I just used Find/Replace with these strings:
Find: \r\d+\.
(There are two spaces at the end of the Find string.)
Replace: \r
In plain English, this regular expression:
\r\d+\.
means:
| \r | a new line (a carriage return) |
| \d+ | one or more digits: the \d matches a number, and the + means "one or more" |
| \. | a period is a special character in regular expressions that matches any single character; putting a backslash before it means "match just a real period character, not any other character) |
So, all together, it means:
Find a new line, followed by one or more numbers, followed by a period, followed by two spaces
and replace that with
just a new line.
(Instead of using the \r return character, I could use ^ to indicate the beginning of the line, but I can't always remember off the top of my head that it's the ^ character that means "starting at the beginning of the line", but I always remember that \r is a carriage return.)
That quick search-and-replace gave me exactly what I needed:
Steely Dan - Reeling in the Years
Neil Young - Are You Ready for the Country
(News: Munich)
Bill Withers - Lean on Me
The Stylistics - Betcha By Golly, Wow
(TV: The Paul Lynde Show)
Jimmy Cliff - You Can Get it if You Really Want
The Raspberries - I Wanna Be With You
(Movie: Cabaret)
David Bowie - Moonage Daydream)
Yes - Roundabout
(Ian Anderson Interview)
Jethro Tull - Thick as a Brick (BOS)
Faces - Stay With Me
And since I had several playlists with line numbers all in one file, I was able to use this search-and-replace to fix all of them at once. It saves me a lot of time.
My favorite text editor, BBEdit, has had outstanding support for regular expressions for years. I always enjoy having it magically refine my text.