On Mon Nov 08 2010 05:23:17 GMT+1000 (PGT) THDW wrote:

> If I am looking for the string: 'any letter' followed by a space and a
> full stop, how do I tell Nisus that I want to remove the space but I
> want to keep the letter which it has found ?
>
> How do I tell Nisus in the simplest language possible that I am looking
> for the string of a space, any letter, a space - but to exclude 'a' as
> any letter ?
>
> Both questions apply to Normal find. The other two find languages are
> beyond me.

You can't do either with Normal find. You're looking for a pattern which 
needs the more powerful "regular expression" language.

The first is pretty straightforward. You want to find a single letter 
and remember it, followed by a space and full stop, and put out the 
letter you remembered and the full stop. So you're going to have your 
find string looking like:

Capture(AnyLetter) .

and the replace string:

Captured1.

The second is a little more complex, as you are asking for a "wild card" 
which is not one of the ones supplied by Nisus, and I think you have to 
go to PowerFind Pro for that. You want to match a range of characters 
which is all the letters, excluding a, meaning all letters from b to z. 
(If you want to match both upper and lower case, this will get a bit 
more complex still.) Your search string will then be:

([b-z]) \.

and the replace string:

\1.

The backslashes are important, as a full stop on its own has the special 
meaning "any character", while \. means the full stop exactly.

To include upper case letters, just change the [b-z] to [b-zB-Z].

Hope that's simple enough for you!

John