Plugin to ignore tags when searching?
 

I'm wondering if anyone has made a modification to Sigil that allows a user to specify when doing a find/replace to ignore html/css tags and header information.

As an example, I recently had a book that often — and inconsistently-used a simple minus sign to separate a sentence instead of an em- or en-dash (as seen in my cleverly-hidden example earlier in this sentence). But the search was rather obnoxious as searching for the minus sign gave me a lot of false positives inside style tags (e.g. <p class="italic-and-bold">). Given that the minus sign was also frequently-used as in my use of the phrase "frequently-used", I had enough false positives to sift through as it was!

I've found a few examples of regexes that can be used to ignore these tags, such as Timur's examples here, but I'm a pretty lazy guy and was wondering if there were an easier way in the form of a Sigil plugin.

Ideally, what I'm imagining is an additional dropdown menu in the search/replace panel's "Mode" section, that would have the options to "Ignore Tags", "Only Search in Tags", and "Search Everywhere".

Does anything like this exist? Thanks for the help.

It exists in the calibre editor https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/edi...ring-html-tags

@mods Apologies if this is out of line in the Sigil forum, if so, please feel free to delete, but I figured that it might be helpful to the OP.

I normally use regular expressions to restrict matches to being outside tags. This is relatively straight forward and will greatly diminish your false positives. I believe this was already discussed in the Sigil Regular Expression thread. Simple text search in BookView works as well although I hate to push BookView to anyone.

I use the spellchecker for this particular case, Show all words, Filter for -. It's available in Sigil and calibre editor spellcheckers, and in the calibre editor's Tools->Reports->Words tool.

BR

No problem. I personally don't mind anyone pointing out the (dis)advantages of either editor for the benefit those asking the questions.

We've had a couple people in the past who liked to camp out and point out calibre equivalents for every single feature/assistance request that newcomers brought up in the Sigil forum. I freely admit that THAT tended to get on my nerves after a while.

But you're welcome to comment here any time, Kovid. :D

Cool, glad I didn't step on any toes :)