I've seen it, but meanwhile i tested this:

It handles the first 4 words of an "let"-paragraph. (Perkins suggestion built in) Maybe you give it a try.

@mmat No, getting strange results..
@Perkin No, same as above.

Sending the source odt as well

I've found a problem/difference with replacing once and replacing all, using both my and mmat1's replace strings, when doing a step replace the last space is inside the span, but just doing a replace all, the last space is outside it.

Just posting a report in 0.5.3 release thread.

It's maybe just tidy ??

Using your epub and concatenating the two let1/2 styles and removing the now extraneous </span>, I get a odd result as well, so it's not the actual regex, it's the css :D

looking into it.

@mmat1, tidy is off, and even if on shouldn't alter that anyway.

I'll look on your source.

@perkin:You're right, Sigil shouldn't do this, but sometimes it does unexpected things...

Until the css is sorted, you can just use mmat1's solution with(out) the combined let1/2 styles.

That should do. At least it's only one step - which is what you asked for originally ;).

A last suggestion from my side, i notice that it will not work, if there are accented characters, so search should better look like this:

And I've noticed that if/because the spans are combined, the measurements are now from the new fontsize, which is 4.6em rather from default fontsize

First thanks to the three of you for your quick and efficient help.

Thanks a lot, this time it's working!! And yes, I did not use \w because I needed to take care of accented characters, punctuation signs, apostroph and so on which can all be found in the first four words of French texts.

I will study it and check Perkin's measurements. :)

Have some of you any idea how to execute one after another, in automatic mode, several regex? (not related to each other like these two) Is there a tool that can do it?

Right, create a new style in the css (or adapt your existing one)
Edit: I don't know if you want to change the french comments :)

Then using

It's easier to do on the html before you get it into Sigil, but one tool that can work on multiple files as well as running multiple S&R's is PowerGREP

It's not as complicated as it first looks, once you get to using it. If you do a sequence, that runs multiple s&r's over any files etc.

They also do a few other brilliant regex products (testing/building/explaining) and a texteditor (which is my preferred editor).

@Perkin

After successive refinements, this looks better indeed. I will try this to morrow.

I go straight from odt to EPUB. I just tweak the EPUB a little after converting, but most of the work is done without touching directly any html file.

I am a Linux user, but I see now which kind of tool can do it. My idea was to add to our existing EPUB converting program a kind of editable super macro (the user could insert or modify any Regex inside). But, if the user needs Power Grep to use it, it would be a self-defeating purpose. On the other hand, if Power Grep can help me prepare this kind of super macro which later could be used without it, as a kind of program, yes it would be worthwhile.

Powergrep looks really powerful at first glance, at second glance I saw the price ... :)

So I may mention the command-line oriented unix-tools sed or awk, which are available for windows as well. With awk you can do nearly anything, but you'll have to build some skills first...

I agree, need to learn more regex fu. ;) I haven't used PowerGrep for ages, and must have been demo, didn't realise it was that dear. My toolbar and smilies aren't working, had to add < b > tags myself, was working earlier though.

Uhm, did I state correctly what i meant ? "Building skills" is meant in order going to use "awk". That has nothing to do with regex, it's just the art of tricky skript-programming. With awk, you can have a html as input and get a list of primes as output (each word replaced by a prime in order).
And it was not stated in any context of your skills, if it was understood this way i must apologize.

No need for apology, half my fault at not reading it correctly.
Not having used awk I just thought it was another grep style prog using regex - again my fault.
(My brain is only half working at moment 'cause of medicaton - at least that's what I'm blaming it on :) - I think I've used today's lucidity quota up earlier, on the actual regex problem and css adjustment.)

"Sed" is a grep-style regex tool, "awk" is much more, it's actually a script-programming environment.

I hope, you'll be better soon.

I tried your solutions: both are working.

I have rather stay with mmat's though because with the second one I found it a little more tricky to finetune the dropcap position. BTW, a good part of my short science on dropcaps come from here.

Thanks again and take care.

NB: I'll have a look at "awk".

I have a few documents in MS Word that I'm going to convert to ebooks. The documents have a lot of endnotes, and as usual, Word puts out a lot of junk when saved a html. I am very new to regex, and was wondering if I could get help. I want to search on:
and replace it with:
The endnote numbers are from 1 to 125. Is there a single regex that can do this in Sigil?
Thanks in advance.

Find:
Replace:
Or if you know, absolutely, that the numbers will always be the same across each instance:
Find:
Replace:
NOTE: I replaced the "name" attribute with "id" because "name" is old and tired. ;)
EDIT: The above stuff is all based on the assumption that the <b>, <span>, and font-family/size stuff is identical in all of the original endnote code instances. You'd need to make judicious use of (.*?) if not.
(and I had a mistake in the first edition of this post that I corrected)

Thank you sir!!
Changing name= to id= is one of the first S&R I do on a document.

You would think that Word would have changed over by now.

Specifying space character in replace field?
 

With the old regex engine, I could use '\x20' to specify a space in the replacement pattern, but that no longer works in the current version.

Other than using a literal space, how do I specify a space character in the replace field? (I don't want to use a literal space, because I often save my s/r patterns in a development notes file, and they're hard to see in plain text.)

You could use

(remove the space)

Edit: I think you might only be able use that if the replace is part of text - not inside a tag.

That would work, but I was looking for something that would insert an actual ASCII space in the text, rather than an entity (for readability).

After lots of experimenting, I discovered that I could use
as the replacement term but that seems indirect and inelegant. But it works.

G

Hi

It's just a small question. To select letters intended to become dropcaps, I use this part of a Regex:
([A-Z])

However, I realize this does not select accented capitals that do exist in French (like É, À, Ô and so on). Of course, I can just suppress their accents. But if I wish to make a drop-cap out of an accented capital, what would be the code?

([.]) is a catch-all. Have you better?

([A-ZÉÀÔ])

the dash just means range. the normal is any one of these. You can use both as I have

Will catch all upper-case letters (including unicode characters), if that's what you're looking for. Add parentheses to make it a capture group if desired, of course.

@DiapDealer, theducks

Thanks very much for your replies. As this regex is intended to be used for French texts, I will use theducks' proposal. I just did not know one could add letters this way as I did not see any example of it.

Just so you know, it doesn't matter what language it is. If it's a valid uppercase letter (including unicode characters with acute, grave, breve umlauts—any valid diacritic, really), (\p{Lu}) will capture it. But whatever you're comfortable with is the way to go. ;)

@DiapDealer

Did not see you reply in time. It really needed your explanation. Yes of course, this is also a very convenient solution. I note it. Thanks again.

Change Chapter text to Heading
 

How can I change in Sigil all the occurrences of "Chapter" like the following example:
Where "One" can be "Two", "Three", and so on...

...or even "1", "2", "3",...


with

Many thanks!


Edit: Never mind I think I found the solution in JeremyR's post. Many thanks, JeremyR :2thumbsup

You don't say what the original Chapter One looks like in code view. Just the text isn't sufficient to make sure the find/replace is correct.

Assuming you have
and want
then
might get you what you want.

Many thanks, meme. You are correct.

In Code View it is

Using JeremyR's code seems to do the trick. The Chapters are now

I omitted the horizontal line and used calibre to split the html at every h3.

Don't know if I'm doing this right though :)

I have more books with the same issue. I'll try with your code next time.

Many thanks.

Successive Find and Replace

I wish to clean an html text which suffers from recurrent mistakes from an OCR engine (Cuneiform).

When I meet one the mistakes, I make a replacement and I note it. After some pages, I met most of the mistakes and now I intend to build a regex, adding as many as 15 successive simple search and replace like the following two.
A@ → à
B@ → ç
I do not know how to perform these 15 F&R within a simple regex.Suppose I would like to build it for the two above, what should I write?

Nota: I already use utf8 for the whole text.

I'm not sure what you're asking for is feasible. What you've described is something that would be more suited to an external program/algorithm (or a plugin) rather than one single Regular Expression. Finding all 15 with one expression wouldn't be the hard part... replacement based on "if/then" logic is where it would fall apart.

OK. Thanks for your answer. I will try to find another solution

You could create a simple sed script with one line for each character that you need to fix. E.g.

Then simply save the lines as a utf8 text file (without BOM), e.g. fix.sed, and execute it with sed:

(Note that this will overwrite the original files.)

@Doitsu

Wow!! It's working very well! Thanks a lot!!
What means BOM?

Sorry, I was only thinking in terms of the F&R regex feature of Sigil. :o