10: Find and Replace

Here is Textpad's 'find and replace' box. 

We open it by using F8.

You'll notice that most of the options are the same as ''find' - see post 7 for an explanation of these. There are some differences: 

No wrapped search. 'Find next' only works downwards to the end of the file.

Selected text. You can highlight some text, and make changes in the highlighted text only. 

What we're interested in here are the Go buttons. Once you've typed what you want to find into the 'Find' box, choose between:

Find next Finds the next occurence of what's in the 'find what' box

Replace Replaces the current selection with what's in the 'replace with' box

Replace next Replaces the next match of the 'find what' box' with what's in the 'replace with' box

Replace all Replaces every single match of the 'find what' box' with what's in the 'replace with' box

You will almost always use Replace all.

1. What Regular Expressions do

These tutorials are intended as a guide for people who wrangle metadata.

More specifically, they're aimed at people who wrangle tab-separated metadata and have noticed that excel has it's limits.

The name 'regular expressions' (or 'regex') isn't particularly intuitive, and at first sight, regular expressions themselves look a lot like goobledegook.

They do make sense though, and with a little practice, can be very, very powerful.