How to wrap selection by strings on both ends?

[pepr]

For document editing, I need to wrap the selected part of the text by special quotes (UNICODE characters that are used in Czech for quoting), like this:

„this is the text to be quoted“

Having this is the text to be quoted, I wan to select it, and to start something named do do the quoting. Say, I wan to name it as uv.

I remember from some editor (in the past, I do not remember the editor) that it could be done like

xxx #this is the text to be quoted#uv xxx

In other words, the text was marked by # (or something like that), the second one was followed by the name of the macro, and started by some hot-key.

Is anything like that possible in the Notepad++ editor?

Thanks,
Petr

[Mark Olson]

@pepr

I am having a hard time understanding what you are asking for. If you are not a native English speaker, I would recommend writing what you want in your native language, and copy-pasting it into Google Translate rather than trying to do the translation yourself. It sounds like there are two things you want:

1. Wrap the selected text in quotes
2. Add a # and then a name to the end of the selected text

How to wrap the selected text in quotes

Important: while doing steps 2-4, do not click in the text area of the Notepad++ window! If you do, your selection will change and that will become part of the macro.

1. Go to Macro->Start Recording from the Notepad++ main menu bar
2. Go to Search->Replace... from the main menu; the find/replace form will pop up.
3. Set the fields of the find/replace form as follows:
   • Find what: -> (?s).*
   • Replace with: -> „${0}“
   • Wrap around -> checked
   • Search Mode -> Regular expression
   • In selection -> checked
4. Hit the Replace button
5. Go to Macro->Stop Recording from the Notepad++ main menu
6. Try selecting a different area of text and run Macro->Playback from the Notepad++ main menu, and make sure that the macro does what you want
7. Go to Macro->Save Current Recorded Macro from the NPP main menu and save your macro with a name. You can also give this macro a keyboard shortcut for ease of use later.

How to add #uv at the end of your selected text

1. Repeat steps 1-2 of the list above
2. Set the fields of the find/replace form as follows:
   • Find what: -> (?s).*
   • Replace with: -> ${0}#uv
   • Wrap around -> checked
   • Search Mode -> Regular expression
   • In selection -> checked
3. Repeat steps 4-7 of the list above

Other notes

For more reading on macros, see the documentation here.

[pepr]

@Mark-Olson: Thanks. The first part works exactly as I wanted. Looking at the shortcuts.xml, I can see:

        <Macro name="uv" Ctrl="no" Alt="no" Shift="no" Key="0">
            <Action type="3" message="1700" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="" />
            <Action type="3" message="1601" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="(?s).*" />
            <Action type="3" message="1625" wParam="0" lParam="2" sParam="" />
            <Action type="3" message="1602" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="„${0}“" />
            <Action type="3" message="1702" wParam="0" lParam="896" sParam="" />
            <Action type="3" message="1701" wParam="0" lParam="1609" sParam="" />
        </Macro>

For explaining the second part. The other mentioned editor used the #quoting by hashes#macro_name to ge the same effect. Some shortcut was used to tell that the thing before is the macro name, and the special character is the delimiter (instead of making a selection). It may have been the JED editor that simulates Emacs (using a different inner language). The macros were easily edited, and you could use even more delimiters to wrap the parts, say, by more complex LaTeX macros with more arguments. I am not using it more than 20 years; so, I am not sure whether JED was the one.

[mkupper]

@pepr, one minor comment on

„this is the text to be quoted“

I see that for the opening quote you used U+201E DOUBLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK. I expected you to use U+201F DOUBLE HIGH-REVERSED-9 QUOTATION MARK for the closing quote. Instead you used U+201C LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK.

The difference is

• „this is the text to be quoted‟ using U+201F
• „this is the text to be quoted“ using U+201C

If you intended to use U+201F then the line in your shortcuts.xml would look like

<Action type="3" message="1602" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="„${0}‟" />

The second part that you desire likely could be done in Notepad++. @Mark-Olson already provided you with a hint on how to do it by showing you a search replace that takes the current selection and inserts a „ in front of it and appends a ‟ at the end of it.

If instead you want to type

xxx #this is the text to be quoted#uv xxx

You then run this regular expression search/replace:
** Search: #([^#]+)#uv
Replace: „${1}‟ **

That will replace the #...#uv style marks in your text with „...‟.

If you want to be able to use several styles of quotes using #xx or other things besides #uv then it’s still possible though gets far messier do to it with a single search/replace.

[pepr]

@mkupper: Well, the Czech typography uses the double quotes also known as 99 and 66 (because of the shape) — the 99 low, and 66 up. See the image cut from somewhere:

Thanks for the hint for using the regular expression with # as marks. I was not thinking about that possibility.

@anyone: The macro recording and playback in Notepad++ is fine for simple things, in my opinion. However, it is difficult to modify the macros (through editing shortcuts.xml). Is there any plugin that implements some alternative approach to the macros?

[Alan Kilborn]

@pepr said in How to wrap selection by strings on both ends?:

Is there any plugin that implements some alternative approach to the macros?

There’s SCRIPTING.

[pepr]

@Alan-Kilborn: Thanks a lot! Being fluent with Python, I have installed the PythonScript, and I am learning first steps.