Searching for "& # 9 ; "

[oston]

In an epub (exported from InDesign) that I was sent to work on, there are many encoded TAB (& # 9 ; ) characters where there were tabs in the InDesign file.

But Sigil does not seem to be able to find such characters in a search and replace. Using regex with \t also does not find them.

Is there a work around without using a text editor?

If I had the InDesign file, I could remove the tab chars there, and I expect I will need to get that. But maybe someone here has an easier work around?

Thanks
Jim

[KevinH]

Try going to Sigil's Preferences to Preserve Entities. Then add to that list. Then run Sigil's Mend on all your xhtml files.

Now search for the that specific entity in the text to see if any remain and replace them as you want.

[oston]

Great-
Many thanks, Kevin
Jim

[KevinH]

You can also use the following to find tab chars directly in Find without having to play with the PreserveEntities settings at all using Regex mode:

\x{09}

That will look for a specific utf-8 hex char

or the more traditional

\t

But search mode most be Regex for those to work. Normal mode removes the significance of the leading "\"

If you copy a tab from some text editor, you can actually use Normal mode and just paste the copied tab into the Find field and that would work too.

Typing a tab using the keyboard directly into the Find field will not work as tab is used to switch input fields in Qt for people who prefer/need keyboard accessibility instead of the mouse to select a field.

[oston]

Many thanks, Kevin
Jim

[DiapDealer]

It is my understanding that tab entities (or characters) are still going to be collapsed into a single space by just about any renderer out there. Without some sort of PRE tag, there's very little point in using them.

Even our Sigil Mend code won't preserve tab entities/characters not inside pre tags. They get converted to a single space. Inside of pre tags, a tab entity will be preserved if it's in the preserve entities list, or converted to the U0009 character if it is not.