Text and Words: Baseline Can we do global find replace to change characters in text following orthography change

[Scott Dysart]

A FLEx user is working with a language group that has made an orthography change and would like to change the character being used in all of his Text and Words entries.  Is it possible to do this via Bulk Edit in FLEx or does he have to go through each entry to make the change?  There are about 400 entries in his Text and Words collection.

[Andreas_Joswig]

There is a Bulk-Edit Wordforms view in the Texts-and-Words area of Fieldworks, where the word forms can be changed in one go. But you will the still have to change the character in each text, using the Edit-Replace command from the menu in the baseline tab of each text. Then you will have to go through the texts and need to re-assign the correct word analyses to each word that got changed.

Note that changing characters with bulk-edit can be tricky, particularly if digraphs are involved. It is very important to make a backup before you proceed with this.

Andreas

On 11/06/2017 09:09 AM, Scott Dysart wrote:

A FLEx user is working with a language group that has made an orthography change and would like to change the character being used in all of his Text and Words entries.  Is it possible to do this via Bulk Edit in FLEx or does he have to go through each entry to make the change?  There are about 400 entries in his Text and Words collection.

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[Ken Zook]

If the changes are limited to a reasonably small number of words, you can go to Word Analyses and select the wordform you want to change and choose Tools…Spelling…Change Spelling. This dialog allows you to change the spelling which will change the wordform, the lexical headword for monomorphemic words, as well as the baselines and maintain the analyses. You can change all occurrences or selected occurrences.

 

If it involves a lot of wordforms and can be changed via a CC table, it can be done directly in the .fwdata file. I’d recommend sending the project to me for doing this as it gets fairly involved finding all of the relevant data in the fwdata file.

 

Ken

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[Ken Zook]

If the orthography change needs to be made throughout all strings in a given language, and if the changes do not change the number of code points for each character, a fairly simple CC table can be written to work on the fwdata file. See section 6.1 in http://software.sil.org/fieldworks/wp-content/uploads/sites/38/2016/10/FieldWorks-7-XML-model.pdf.

 

If the change involves a different number of code points for some characters, you can probably take this same approach, but need to also clear (set to false) all of the ParseIsCurrent Booleans in StTxtPara objects so that it will reparse all of the interlinear data when you go to access it. If you open the project and go to Word Analyses, it will reparse all of the data.

 

Mucking with the fwdata file has potential for trashing the whole project if done incorrectly, so by all means make a backup before attempting anything like this.

 

Ken

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