Can wildcards be used in Find/Replace?

[Droewyn]

I had converted an Amazon book to a epub in Calibre after switching from Kindle to Kobo. I no longer have my Kindle -- the reason I switched was because my old Oasis was physically smashed -- and can no longer download my purchased books.

I noticed that there were a large number of smushed-together words in the converted file, so I popped it into Sigil with the intention of fixing it.

Here's the problem. All the instances of smushed words are due to the following:

<span epub:type="pagebreak" id="page_33" title="33" class="calibre"></span>


I can do a find/replace, but each instance increments the number in the HTML by one. There are 420 of these stupid things in total.

Is there a way I can use a wildcard in find/replace to knock all of these out at once? I'd rather not have to spend all afternoon incrementing numbers to fix my epub.

[KevinH]

Yes, this is covered in the regex chapters in the Sigil User Guide.

These are page break marks. You kight want to keep them and add a space after each to prevent smushed words.

In Find and Replace, you want to enable Regex mode and use a wildcard specific to digits.

Simple way to do that is to use the string:

\d+

which should capture 1 or more digits in a row.

[phillipgessert]

You can do it via regex. If you're feeling brave, you can go with:

<span epub:type="pagebreak".*?/span>

or if you'd like to be a little more careful, maybe:

<span epub:type="pagebreak" id="page_(\d{1,3})" title="(\d{1,3})" class="calibre"> </span>

The first one would grab any span that starts with epub:type="pagebreak", the second additionally drills it down to wildcards on that incrementing page number. \d{1,3} finds any number of 1–3 digits in those slots.

[Droewyn]

Oh, thank you both!