Find this NOT that

[Danger]

I'm trying to do a search but a narrow one. Basically I've converted some PDFs to ePub but some paragraphs are broken up say one ends with half a sentence and the other paragraph continues on with the sentence.

I want to do search for any 2 characters and </p> but don't find ."</p>, .</p>, ?</p>, ."</p>, ?"</p>, !</p>, !"</p> as those should be proper sentence enders.

Right now I have [^.,^\?,^\!][a-z,A-Z,”,\,, ,+]</p> and it seems to work but is there a simpler way of doing this?

[huebi]

I#m doing this with

s: ([a-zA-Z])</p>\s*<p>
r: \1##
o: minimal matching

The reason for the two #: its more easy to find out if a word is splitted or the sentence is splitted between two words.

Now i'm looking for a lower case letter, followed by ##, followed by an uppercase letter. This is for sure a sign for two seperate words.

s: ([a-z])##([A-Z])
r: \1_\2
o: minimal matching, match case

(the underscore represents a blank)

Now i'm going thru looking for two separate words:

s: ([a-zA-Z])##([a-zA-Z])
r: \1_\2
o: minimal matching, match

If the ## is between two words, i press alt-r (replace), otherwise its a splitted word and i'm skipping this with alt-f (find next)

At the end only the ## splitting a word are remaining and i'm substituting them with

s: ([a-zA-Z])##([a-zA-Z])
r: \1\2
o: minimal matching

Last step is searching for a comma, question mark or exlamation mark:

s: ([,?!])</p>\s*<p>
r: \1_
o: minimal matching

More steps then yours, but i'm replacing the text without changing it manually which can be really annoying.

[mshellberg]

When I'm joining split sentences like that, I search for a lowercase letter after the <p> tags...

search: </p>\s*<p>([a-z])
replace: _\1
(Note the space before \1.)

Hope that helps.

[huebi]

<p>I had splitted sen</p>

</P>tences like this one</p>

I need to investigate why the - ( may be soft hyphen) disappeared...

[Danger]

Originally Posted by mshellberg

When I'm joining split sentences like that, I search for a lowercase letter after the <p> tags...

search: </p>\s*<p>([a-z])
replace: _\1
(Note the space before \1.)

Hope that helps.

It helps but I think I have to do like huebi suggested and do several sweeps. looking for different things each time because I found not all sentence splits end with a lowercase letter. Some ended with quotes but no period, some with a comma, some with a question/exclamation mark but no quotes because the person speaking was still speaking but it was continued in another paragraph.

Basically I was trying to catch that all in one go. Looking at other examples I think I have too many commas to separate stuff that don't need it.

[^.^\?^\!][a-zA-Z”\,\?\!+]</p>

Should find: ?</p> but not ?”</p> or z”</p> but not z.”</p>

Just tested this with the following BOLD found ITALICS skipped:
<p>x?</p>
<p>x.”</p>
<p>x?</p>
<p>X!</p>
<p>x!”</p>
<p>x,</p>
<p>x,”</p>
<p>x”</p>

EDIT: The above can be simplified further: [^.?!][a-zA-Z”,?!]</p>
So basically we now have: if any of those 3 characters [^.?!] appear before any of these characters [a-zA-Z”,?!] (specifically the”) & </p> then skip that find.

[Danger]

Working on a book this morning and I found after stripping out all the class, style and useless spans/divs I was left once again with broken up sentences like this:
<p>this is</p>
<p>part of a</p>
<p>paragraph.</p>

<p>&nbsp;</p>

So I came up with:
FIND: ([a-z,’”.?!-])</p>\n\n\s\s<p>([a-z,A-Z“-])
REPLACE: \1 \2

\n = new line
\s = white space

All the <p>&nbsp;</p> are ignored and then I just strip them out when all the paragraphs are back together.

Interesting info here