Some searches don't respect "all text files"

[retiredbiker]

I have several books with this in each file, in the <style> part of the file header:

.para-center {
    font-size: small;
    text-indent: 0;
    font-family: serif;
    text-align: center;
}

And I wanted to get rid of the "font-size: small;" lines. If I do a normal search/replace for the string "font-size: small;", the editor will only act on the line in the current file. Ctrl-N also says only one match. But this is in all 58 files. Same behaviour if I select the files and try searching on "selected files". And the same if I try the line "font-family: serif;". If I just use "Find" to step through all the occurrences, it just does this one file.

But, If I just search for "small" or "font" or "family", it finds everything in all the files - Ctrl-N gives the right number, and I can step through them all, whether they are in the headers or the text.

I tried searching for the whole block of text...it found and replaced 27 out of 58 occurrences, which is even worse than just doing one file, because you don't really know what it's done. I finally resorted to regex (.para-center{.*?}), and that seems to work reliably.

Anybody have any idea what could be blocking the multi-file search?

Thanks!

[kovidgoyal]

Your files might look identical but they are not atually identical. There might be extra spaces or invisible characters, etc

[DNSB]

And I would suggest moving those styles to a single stylesheet just to make it easier to manage and edit.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by DNSB

And I would suggest moving those styles to a single stylesheet just to make it easier to manage and edit.

Amen!

[deback]

One trick that works for me all the time is to hit the Beautify Files button and then do the search. When I don't do that, the search will not find all occurrences.

[retiredbiker]

Thanks everyone...

Yep, I agree that styles belong in a css file, not a text file. That's what I ended up doing. I just hit this weird behaviour while I was trying to figure out how this particular book worked, and it bugged me no end.

And yes, beautifying files can help...along with "\s+" in the right places to allow for variable spaces and lines. Sometimes I'll even do a regex: replace \n with a space character, then replace two space characters with one until the replacements hit zero...that really cleans up a raggety file.


I've hit other odd - very odd - cases where the "select all files" did not seem to work, but this was the first one that seemed to have some consistency to it, enough that I could try and figure it out. Still confused, but at a higher level!