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    Basic question: What wildcard characters can be used in find & replace, and what do the characters represent?

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    • Rick DicksonR Offline
      Rick Dickson
      last edited by

      Apologies for the newbie question: What are the various wildcard characters that can be used in find & replace, and what do they represent?

      For example, if I want to replace a comma with a space in all instances where the comma is in between 2 numbers, how do I do that?

      Thank you for your time and guidance!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Matyáš KrupičkaM Offline
        Matyáš Krupička
        last edited by Matyáš Krupička

        Hi,
        there are none :)

        If you want to perform this kind of replacement, you will need to learn regular expressions (a.k.a. regexp).

        There are dozens of tutorial on the net, e.g. here:
        http://www.regular-expressions.info/

        I should warn you though, that regexp are like women: powerful, mysterious and unforgiving :)
        And they usually don’t behave the way you expect.
        But don’t be discouraged. It is a great tool, if used properly. In my work, where I deal a lot with a plaintext processing, I would be lost without them

        Anyway, answer to your particular question about space between two numbers is
        with regexp search mode:
        Replace
        (\d),(\d)
        with
        \1 \2

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