On 11/8/10, John Brownie wrote:

>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 ?

[ ... ]

>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:

Just as a picky footnote -- there *is* a way to do it in PowerFind. You need to do three substitutions. (Pretty standard programming trick, as I'm sure you know.) The first time, substitute some goofy set of characters that won't occur elsewhere, say "^^a^^", for the " a ". Then change all other instances of space-any-letter-space to the preferred form. Then chance "^^a^^" back to " a ".

I can't think of any way to do it in normal find, though -- not without doing 26 substitutions, anyway.

To the original poster: It really is worth learning Power Find. Power Find Pro may be a little much -- it's memorizing gibberish. But Power Find gives you at least 75% of the functionality at about 25% of the learning curve.

It's still worth reading Joe Kissell's _The Nisus Way_. The syntax of Power Find has changed, unfortunately, but the concepts haven't changed at all.

-- 
Bob Waltz
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"The one thing we learn from history --
   is that no one ever learns from history."