Adding " at the beginning and end of every line

W C

I was given the following info and it worked until yesterday but does not work today. This is VERY strange. Instead of adding just a double quote at the beginning or end, it replaces the first or last character with the & symbol.

For example, you can add a quote at the end of every line:
Edit > Find & Replace
Search for: .$
Replace with: &"

Options/Regular expressions: ON

Click Replace All

And, similarly, at the beginning:
Search for: ^.
Replace with: "&

I have restarted the program and reloaded the document with no success. What is wrong now? I have tried it over and over again and get the same result.

Thanks.

gerdb42

I think you need to write $&" and "$& for replacement. You may want to use [^"] instead of . to skip lines already beginning/ending with ". Use [^"\r\n] to also skip empty lines.

Claudia Frank

Hello @W-C

when having

Search for: $
Replace with: "

and

Search for: ^
Replace with: "

then it should have worked but not with the dot char added and with the restriction gerdb42 mentioned.

You can also use a single regex, something like

Search for: ^(.+)$
Replace with: "\1"

Search for explained:
^ = from the beginning of the line
(.+) = looking for atleast one but as much as possible chars and return the match until
$ = end of line is reached

Replace with explained:
" = insert a double quote followed by the
\1 = matched result and
" = add an additional double quote

Cheers
Claudia