Reply To: XMetaL Author Enterprise 5.5 – search and replace string

[Derek Read]

I think you can only really do this in Plain Text view, since your id values and the content inside the and the other text is probably different for different elements. You can find things using regular expressions but there is no mechanism in this version to leave some portion of what has been found unchanged (the replacement affects everything you find).

So, use Plain Text view and make two separate replacements like this:

Replacement #1:
Find: Replace: .Find: .
Replace:

The other option would be to write a script. That would involve walking the document using a few different APIs, finding the element in question, checking to see if it has a period before it, if not add one, checking to see if it has a period after it and removing it. Unless you need to do this all the time (or for multiple users) I'd just use the Find described above.

Reply