[theducks]

Originally Posted by JustinD

I have an epub book that has the following formatting:

Since long before the coming of Gods and mortals, the great rock of Krasnegar<br class="calibre1" />
had stood amid the storms and ice of the Winter Ocean, resolute and eternal.<br class="calibre1" />
Throughout long arctic nights it glimmered under the haunted dance of aurora and<br class="calibre1" />
the rays of the cold, sad moon, while the icepack ground in useless anger around<br class="calibre1" />

So, each line is unnaturally shortened by the <br class="calibre1" />

How do I edit to remove this while keeping my actual paragraphs? Sorry for what is a simple question but I am new to this. I am hoping I could have a regex but given there doesn't seem to be anything distinguishing the end of para from line I am a bit stumped.

any thoughts?
Justin

Jellby has it correct (and I had forgotten about those terribly formatted, exceptions. )

TEST your REPLACE code on a few before using the 'replace all' button

Save your work befor starting the NEXT whole document replace.
File 1 (open from the Recent list) 'Discard' is your friend


Step 1: use a COUNT SEARCH BEFORE (all HTML files) to get an idea of how bad it is

Regex:

 <br class="calibre1" />\s+<br class="calibre1" />

to look to see if they did those type of paragraph breaks.

If you have a lot (more than a few per section split) of </p> tags, those are probably just scene breaks .

Step 1.5: change the scene break to a scene marker (your choice)
the REPLACE for the search term above

</> <p class="scenebreak">* * *</p> <p class="whatever...">

Notes: scenebreak is the name of your css styling selector. The first </p> closes the previous <p> tag. the last <p class=whatever was used to start the original P tag" to make a next paragraph start. Tidy will make the code pretty, so don't worry about newlines

Step 2: is to Now replace the lone BR

Note: don't try and get all cases in a singe pass, but really-really take care to ONLY replace your current target case
Search:

(\w)<br class="calibre1" />\s+<br class="calibre1" />(\w)

\1</p> <p class="[COLOR="RoyalBlue"][COLOR="RoyalBlue"]whatever...">\2

the \1 and \2 puts whatever was matched before and after the BR, back with a end P and a start next P replacing the BR

Step 3:
you may have to create additional searches to handle punctuation and quote (remember to escape wild cards in the search) combination's.

Take your time to learn what works