Change random uppercase words to lower case

[Andy Nickless]

I have some text with random uppercase words (for emphasis) and I want BBEdit to find them and replace them with lower case words.

I ONLY want to change words in which ALL the letters are uppercase - in other words, leave the capital letters at the beginning of sentences and names etc.

As an example, if my sentence is:

The BIG CAT called George, sat on the DARK BROWN mat.

I would like it to look like this:

The big cat called George, sat on the dark brown mat.

Any help with this will be greatly appreciated.

Andy

[Kaveh Bazargan]

Try this:

search: \b([A-Z]+)\b

replace: \L\1

case sensitive

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Kaveh Bazargan PhD

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River Valley Technologies ● Twitter ● LinkedIn ● ORCID ● @kave...@mastodon.social

Accelerating the Communication of Research

  

[Andy Nickless]

Thanks once again, Kaveh.

I tried the search:  \b([A-Z]+)\b

and replace: \L\1

It left two word spaces before the lowercase word.

When I changed the search to:  ([A-Z]+) with word spaces before and after, it did a great job as long as I used the Replace & Find button, but it had one or two quirks. For instance, if you had consecutive uppercase words, it would only find alternate ones.

Also, it didn't find capitalised words with commas, full-stops exclamation marks or question marks. That would be useful.

Lastly, it also found the word I (capitalised, of course) which I didn't want it to.

I hope I'm not being too greedy!

Thanks so much for your help so far, it's saved me quite a lot of time.

[Kaveh Bazargan]

I can look again if it helps. is the job done or useful to have these enhancements added too?

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[Andy Nickless]

Hello Kaveh,

It’s an ongoing project, so if you can improve it, that would be very useful.

Best wishes,

Andy

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[Fletcher Sandbeck]

You could try modifying it like this. Changing \b to (?<=\b) makes it so the match starts at a word boundary but does not include the word boundary in the match. With the corresponding change to (?=\b) at the end of the pattern this prevents the spaces being part of the match so should prevent the alternating behavior. 

And then (?-i) tells it to be case sensitive so you don't need to worry about the dialog setting. 

Find: (?-i)(?<=\b)([A-Z]+)(?=\b)

Replace: \L\1

[fletcher]

On Jun 13, 2023, at 9:33 AM, 'Andy Nickless' via BBEdit Talk <bbe...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Thank you Kaveh,

It’s an ongoing project, so any improvement would be very welcome.

Andy

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[Andy Nickless]

Thank you Fletcher - that's a big improvement!

It will help me a lot.

Is there a way to avoid it finding single capitals - like "I" (capital i) or "A"?
Andy

[Fletcher Sandbeck]

You can adjust the minimum length by changing the + to {2,} which will match strings of 2 or more capital letters.

Find: (?-i)(?<=\b)([A-Z]{2,})(?=\b)

Replace: \L\1

[fletcher]

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[Kaveh Bazargan]

So any single cap letter leave as is? will that work? What will help is if you give a few examples, or put all the words that did not work so I can test it.

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[Andy Nickless]

Thanks to both Kaveh, and Fletcher for their replies.

The following works near-perfectly for me:

(?-i)(?<=\b)([A-Z]{2,})(?=\b)

It's safely saved for future use/reference too! Thanks again!

Andy