Re: XY search question

[Jay McNally jmcnally@xxxxxxxx]

This is a very familiar problem I deal with all the time.
I have taken care of this problem by running a short program (loaded on to
alt+9) with something like 18 search and replace commands that cleans up in
a millisecond files with formatting that has returns inserted by email and
html programs. The main part of the program:

1) Changes each occurrence of a return to a space
2) Changes occurrences of two spaces to one space
This combination creates, in most cases, clean paragraphs w/o the returns
that were inserted by the email or html programs.
Because there is the danger in this process you will loose the markers the
writer intended to establish paragraphs, this program first changes double
hard returns to the string "xxx", (one presumes the text does not have
"xxx" in it). It strips out all hard returns and later replaces the two
hard returns in place the "xxx".
This particular routine works well for me and I use it probably more than a
dozen times a day. I can email it to anyone who wants it. I'm sure it is
clumsy and crude compared to what some XyExperts on this list can do, but
it works for me on probably 80 percent of the files I import from email and
the Internet.



Jay


At 12:49 PM 12/17/01 +0900, you wrote:
> Would it be possible to somehow exclude the Return character from a XYwrite
> search?
> The reason I am asking is that sometimes I have to search for text in messy
> files, either created by people who use a computer like a typewriter, or by
> automatic extraction of text from e.g. Acrobat files.
> I often know the text string is there, but I do not know where it might be
> interrupted by some stupid hard return.
> Tia
>
>
>
> -- Rene von Rentzell, Tokyo (rrr @ twics.com)