Search and replace dilemma

[Andy Nickless]

Forgive the level 0 question, but I want to find instances in a simple text document where various figures have got up against some text, with no space between them. (For example 123Xyz).

I want to keep the figures the same, and the following text the same, but put a word space between them. (For example 123 Xyz).

Can anyone help me with this please - I'm going round in circles here!

Andy

[Neil Faiman]

So you want to find all occurrences of a digit immediately followed by a letter and insert a space between them?

Get the search dialog. Check the Grep box. Clear the Case sensitive box.

Find: (\d)([a-z])

Replace: \1 \2

Click the Replace All button.

Detailed explanation:

• \d matches any digit.
• [a-z] matches any letter.
• \d[a-z] would match a digit immediately followed by a letter. Parenthesizing the two parts of the search string, (\d)([a-z]) does the same search, but when it finds a match, it “captures” the substrings that match the parenthesized components — I,e, the digit and the letter.
• In the replacement string, \1 and \2 stand for the captured substrings that match the parenthesized sub patterns, i.e., the digit and the letter.
• So the replacement string \1 \2 stands for the matched digit, a space, and the matched letter.

So if your input text is 123XyZ, (\d) matches the 3 and assigns it to \1, ([a-z]) matches the X and assigns it to \2, and the the string 3X is replaced by 3 X.

Regards,

Neil Faiman

[Kevin Shay]

If you only want to apply this to figures of a certain length (i.e. 3 or more digits) so it would skip things like "3d" or 'B2B" or "23AndMe", you can use curly brackets to specify a number of occurrences, like:

\d{2,]  <--matches 2 or more digits

\d{3,5} <--matches 3 to 5 digits

Kevin

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[Kaveh Bazargan]

Kevin, small typo:

\d{2,] should be \d{2,}

;-)

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[Kevin Shay]

Oops, sorry. No syntax highlighting in Gmail :)

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[Tom Robinson]

Select the search pattern in the Find dialog, head up to the Edit menu and select Copy as Styled Text

\d{3,5}

Voila :]

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[Jonathan Ultronz]

This is a regular expression pattern that matches any sequence of digits that is at least 3 digits long and no more than 5 digits long. Here's a breakdown of what each component of the pattern means:

• \d: Matches any digit (0-9).
• {3,5}: Quantifier that specifies that the preceding pattern (in this case, \d) should match between 3 and 5 times.

So, this pattern would match any sequence of 3, 4, or 5 consecutive digits. For example, it would match "123", "4567", or "89012", but it would not match "12" or "123456”.

On Apr 21, 2023, at 3:24 PM, Tom Robinson <barefo...@gmail.com> wrote:

\d{3,5}

[Andy Nickless]

Wonderful!

My thanks go out to all who replied - especially Neil Faiman (who was first to reply) for his detailed and very clear explanation. Just what I needed.

Grateful thanks, once again.

Andy