[KevinH]

Okay, using Doitsu's example, I manually edited the sigil_searches.ini file and added a 34th entry and changed the final line size to be 34

Here is a snippet of my new sigil_searches.ini file:

34\Find=Krishna
34\Name=Krishna
34\Replace=K\x1e5b\x1e63\x1e47\x61
4\Find="&(nbsp|#160);(</p>)"
4\Name=Example Searches/Remove Non-Breaking Spaces/Trailing space
4\Replace=\\2
5\Find="(<p[^>]*>)&(nbsp|#160);"
5\Name=Example Searches/Remove Non-Breaking Spaces/Leading space
5\Replace=\\1
6\Find=\x2002
6\Name=Example Searches/Convert Characters to Entities/ensp
6\Replace="&ensp;"
7\Find=\x2003
7\Name=Example Searches/Convert Characters to Entities/emsp
7\Replace="&emsp;"
8\Find=\x2009
8\Name=Example Searches/Convert Characters to Entities/thin space
8\Replace="&thinsp;"
9\Find=\xad
9\Name=Example Searches/Convert Characters to Entities/shy
9\Replace="­"
size=34

Next I edited Sigil/src/MiscEditors/SearchEditorModel.cpp and added a call to use setIniCodec immediately after creating the settings instance as follows:

void SearchEditorModel::LoadData(const QString &filename, QStandardItem *item)
{
    SettingsStore *settings;

    if (filename.isEmpty()) {
        settings = new SettingsStore(m_SettingsPath);
    } else {
        settings = new SettingsStore(filename);
    }

    settings->setIniCodec("UTF-8");

    int size = settings->beginReadArray(SETTINGS_GROUP);

Then I rebuilt Sigil and fired it up and added the following line to my html file:

<p> this is a test: Krishna</p>

Next I went to Tools->Saved Searches and chose Krishna and ran the find and replace on it and received the correct result:

Kṛṣṇa

So, at least for Saved Searches Find and Replace, setting the ini Codec to utf-8 did the right thing. I am not sure how that would work with general "clips" so we will need to check it as well.