replace - Remove everything except for first 3 words of a line in Notepad++

Question

I have a lengthy text document and I would like to remove everything except for the first 3 words of each line. I've seen a few answered questions that allow you to do this but only retaining the first word. I'm just wondering if it is possible with the first 3 instead. Here is an example:

(original)

hello how are you today
this is just a test
today is a great day

(what I would like to keep)

hello how are
this is just
today is a

Answer 1

• Ctrl+H
• Find what: ^w+h+w+h+w+K.*$
• Replace with: LEAVE EMPTY
• CHECK Wrap around
• CHECK Regular expression
• Replace all

Explanation:

^           # beginning of line
    w+         # 1 or more word character
    h+         # 1 or more horizontal space
    w+         # 1 or more word character
    h+         # 1 or more horizontal space
    w+         # 1 or more word character
    K          # forget all we have seen until this position
    .*          # 1 or more any character but newline
$           

Screenshot (before):

Screenshot (after):