Find / Replace two letter words with " " around them

Francis Neal

Hi I have a list of words, either 1 or 2 words long. I want to find all 2 letter words, eg south korea, and replace it with “south korea”. How do I do this?

guy038

Hello, @Francis Neal, and All,

I’m pretty sure that we lack some information !

Let’s suppose the sentence : This is a simple sample sentence

Do you mean that you expect the result "This is" "a simple" "sample sentence" or do I misunderstand you ?

See you later,

Best regards,

guy038

Francis Neal

marine
aviation
harley davidson
social work
south korea
trentham
quantity surveyor
mortgage advisor
ride on cars
cable jointing
theatre technician
heavy plant
career racing
electro mechanical
air condiioning
british airways
aircraft
stansted
air conditioning
civil engineering
agriculture

Above is a sample of the list. I want to find all 2 word lines, and put “” around them. so civil engineering becomes “civil engineering” . Apologies for the lack of info previously. :-)

Alan Kilborn

@Francis-Neal

Something like this might meet your need:

Find what: ^\w+\W\w+$
Replace with: "$0"
Mode: Reg Exp

guy038

Hi, @Francis-Neal, and All,

Ah I see ! Thanks for your reply.

Oh, I just realized that Alan beat me to it ;-)

So, open the Replace dialog

Type in the regex \w+(\h+\w+)+ in the Find what: zone
Type in the regex "$0" in the Replace with: zone
Check the Wrap around option
Select the Regular expression search mode
Click, once on the Replace All button or several times on the Replace button

Et voilà !

Notes :

The part \w+ looks for a non-empty range of word characters ( roughly [A-Za-z0-9_] )
The part \h+\w+ represents any non-empty list of horizontal blank characters ( so, either a Space, Tabulation or No-Break char ), followed with a non-empty range of words characters, again
As this part is embedded in a (....)+ syntax, the blank + word set may be repeated, any time
In replacement, $0 is the overall match, which is surrounded with two " characters

Cheers,

guy038

P.S. :

I supposed that any line, containing more than one word, must be surrounded with double quotes !

An other search syntax could be :

SEARCH (?-s)(?=.+\h).+

Notes :

The part (?-s) is an in-line modifier which tells the regex engine that the dot ( . ) will match a single standard character, only
Then the part (?=.+\h) is a positive look-ahead structure, which needs to be true for an overall match i.e. So the condition : is there, from current position, an horizontal blank char, further on, in current line ?
Finally, if answer is true, the regex engine tries to match the .+ regex, i.e. all the line contents

Francis Neal

Thanks both, just what I wanted absolutely brilliant. Thanks also for the detailed explanation guy038 :-)