Formatting SQL in Notepad++

Suppose you have the following text in your editor:

select FIELD1, FIELD2, FIELD3 from TABLE1;

And you want this formatted to look like this:

select 

 FIELD1,

 FIELD2,

 FIELD3

from TABLE1;

How would you do it?

Well here's an example using search-replace and regular expressions in Notepad++ though you can easily do this in any other good text editor.

There are three steps involved:

Replace the select and white space with a select, new line and tab.

Replace the commas and white space with a comma, new line and tab.

Replace the white space and from with a new line

Navigate to:

Search > Replace (or CTRL+H)

Set the Search Mode to Regular expression (see screenshots below)

Replace the select and white space with select, new line and tab:

Find what: select (don't forget the whitespace at the end)

Replace with: select \n\t (newline & tab)

This gives you:

select 

 FIELD1, FIELD2, FIELD3 from TABLE1;

Replace the commas and white space with a comma, new line and tab:

Find what: , (don't forget the whitespace at the end!)

Replace with: ,\n\t

This gives you:

select 

 FIELD1,

 FIELD2,

 FIELD3 from TABLE1;

Replace the white space and from with a new line and from:

Find what: from (don't forget the whitespace at the start!)

Replace with: \nfrom

This gives you the desired result:

select 

 FIELD1,

 FIELD2,

 FIELD3

from TABLE1;

Also, don't forget to check out the article on auto generating a select statement.