Different search results by file and by all html files?

[bfollowell]

I edit many, MANY ebooks on a daily basis using Sigil. Most I have no problems with at all. There are a few, a rare few though, that don't seem to search properly. Usually it's just special characters like an em dash or an ellipsis. When I search for them in a current file, the results are returned just fine. If I search for them over all html files they return a result of zero. I know there are hundreds of em dashes and ellipsis in the ebook but I can only find them searching file by file not by all html files. It is only the rare ebook that does this. I've checked them across various versions of Sigil across various computers and various operating systems. The only commonality seems to be the epub itself but I have no idea what about the epub would cause this.

Has anyone else ever heard of or experienced this issue? It's very strange and I'd like to figure it out and try to correct if at all possible.

Thanks for any assistance anyone may be able to provide.

Sincerely,
- Byron Followell

[mmat1]

Originally Posted by bfollowell

Has anyone else ever heard of or experienced this issue? It's very strange and I'd like to figure it out and try to correct if at all possible.

Never heard about this. The only thing i can imagine, that there is a failure with the Character-Set. All the html should be utf8, but what if -for some unknown resason- it is not ? S/R would maybe behave as you decribed.

AFAIK, sigil converts automatically to utf8. Have you ever tried to save the epub with sigil, open it again and search (count) again ?

[bfollowell]

Originally Posted by mmat1

AFAIK, sigil converts automatically to utf8. Have you ever tried to save the epub with sigil, open it again and search (count) again ?

Nope. I wasn't having a lot of luck making the changes I needed to make because of this issue. Since I hadn't really made any changes yet, I didn't save. I'll give that a try and see if it fixes anything.

Still, it seems very strange that it would work just fine when searching file by file but not when searching by all html files.

I'll post here if this helps.

- Byron

[bfollowell]

I've got it figured out. OK, saving didn't change anything and didn't help any at all. I was using an older version, something prior to 0.5. One thing I noticed is that, when I looked at an ellipsis or an em dash in code view, I saw an em dash or an ellipsis. I downloaded the most up-to-date version, 0.5.3, and had the same problems and saving and trying again didn't make any difference. Now I've noticed that when looking at any of the special characters in code view, I don't see the characters but I see their character entities. For a left quote I see “ For an em dash I see —

It just seems strange that the older versions didn't show these entities in code view and that I could find these characters just fine searching file by file in code view but not by searching all html files.

Anyway, it's fixed. I can now search for these character entities and change them to the actual character if I want or whatever I want to do with them using all html files and everything seems to be working just fine.

Hopefully this might help someone else in the future.

Thanks.

- Byron

[mmat1]

Originally Posted by bfollowell

Now I've noticed that when looking at any of the special characters in code view, I don't see the characters but I see their character entities. For a left quote I see “ For an em dash I see —

Yupp, older Versions of Sigil (0.3.4) sometimes replace entities (i. e. if you import a html). The latest verson does not !

It's funny to see how the spellcheck runs mad with these entities ....