Another Grep Question

[Fabe]

OLD TEXT:
<p>Section 1: Text text text ...</p>

DESIRED RESULT:
<p>Section 1:</p>

<p>Text text text ...</p>

FIND:
<p>Section \d:

REPLACE:
<p>Section ??:</p>\r\r<p>

RETURNS:
<p>Section ??:</p>

<p>Text text text ...</p>

The red question marks represent a number of unsuccessful tries on my part. I wish the replace to use the found data so my numbers increase appropriately. In some instances they go into double digits (e.g. Section 12: )

Can anyone help? Thanks. - Fabe

[kiwidude]

Originally Posted by Fabe

OLD TEXT:
<p>Section 1: Text text text ...</p>

DESIRED RESULT:
<p>Section 1:</p>

<p>Text text text ...</p>

FIND:
<p>Section \d:

REPLACE:
<p>Section ??:</p>\r\r<p>

RETURNS:
<p>Section ??:</p>

<p>Text text text ...</p>

The red question marks represent a number of unsuccessful tries on my part. I wish the replace to use the found data so my numbers increase appropriately. In some instances they go into double digits (e.g. Section 12: )

Can anyone help? Thanks. - Fabe

There's a number of different ways but this should work:

Find: <p>(Section \d+:) ([^<]+)</p>
Replace: <p>\1</p><p>\2</p>

Make sure you tick the "Minimal matching" checkbox in the options.

[kiwidude]

A translation if needed for your future use and tweaking. I've added a space here and there below just to stop the post displaying smilies without a code section so : ) instead of this

The ( ) brackets around parts in the Find expression mean grab the bits that match inside the brackets into a "group" for use in the Replace expression. Each () pair can be retrieved incrementally in the replace using \1 \2 \3 etc.

So the (Section \d+: ) means find anything that matches "Section " followed by digits (the \d) of which there are one or more (the +) then a ":" colon.

Then in the replace the <p>\1</p> means grab the first ( ) group contents which will be the result of matching (Section \d+: ) in this case, and puts inside <p></p> tags.

The second part of the find is ([^<]+). As above this tells you the match will be put into a group, that you can access in replace using \2.

The [ ]+ says grab one or more characters it can find specified within the square brackets. If you know you are after certain characters you could do [a-z]+ for instance to get only alphabetic letters. However your text likely will contain letters, numbers, spaces, commas, quotes, all sorts of stuff. So rather than actually listing all of the possible values in this case I have said match [^<]+ which means until it reaches not (^) a < character. Effectively it means any characters until it reaches the < of the closing </p> tag.

Hope some of that makes sense... Oh yeah - make sure you tick the "Minimal matching" checkbox in the Options too.

[Fabe]

Kiwidude, thank you so much. I only had to add line feeds to the replace line like this: <p>\1</p>\r\r<p>\2</p>\r to get the correct result. I was floundering, I'm so glad I asked and you were on line. Thanks again. - Fabe

[kiwidude]

Originally Posted by Fabe

Kiwidude, thank you so much. I only had to add line feeds to the replace line like this: <p>\1</p>\r\r<p>\2</p>\r to get the correct result. I was floundering, I'm so glad I asked and you were on line. Thanks again. - Fabe

Glad to help. Sigil will automatically reformat with line feeds when you flick between book/code view anyways.