Wildcard search and replace

[Ken MacDonald]

Hi I cannot get the wildcard search and replace to work. In my text I have some words enclosed in brackets that I wish to remove. (blue/yellow/red). If I type (*) as the search criteria it doesn't work.

Any ideas? Ken

[Thomas Fischer]

Hi Ken,

please have a look at the help for searching with regular expression ("Grep Reference") either in TextWrangler's Help or its "User Manual", both available under the Help Menu.
Just quickly:
To find anything, search for . (dot), for several: .*
To find brackets, you may need to escape them: \[, \], \(, \)
\(.*?\) will find words (or anything without line breaks) included in brackets.

Best
Thomas

Am 03.07.2013 um 11:17 schrieb Ken MacDonald:

> Hi I cannot get the wildcard search and replace to work. In my text I have some words enclosed in brackets that I wish to remove. (blue/yellow/red). If I type (*) as the search criteria it doesn't work.
> Any ideas? Ken
>

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[Christopher Bort]

TextWrangler doesn't have a simple wildcard search. Rather, its
Grep search uses regular expressions, which is orders of
magnitude more powerful. To get started, see the user manual's
chapter on searching with Grep. if you have specific questions
once you've wet your toes, folks on the list will be happy to help.
--
Christopher Bort
<top...@thehundredacre.net>

[Being Again]

orders of magnitude or not, grep is 20 times more complicated and confusing to learn and more irritating, therefore the majority of ordinary users will not bother, no one mid task - has 2 days to take out - to grope forums and learn grep, you have a tick box for grep which can be toggled, why not have one for wildcard as *, job sorted task achieved 5 seconds later every one back to work, nobody wasting more of their lives than necessary on the time-sink that computers seem to be today, in terms of productivity.

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Feb 5, 2018, at 6:09, Being Again <being...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> orders of magnitude or not, grep is 20 times more complicated and confusing to learn and more irritating, therefore the majority of ordinary users will not bother, no one mid task - has 2 days to take out - to grope forums and learn grep, you have a tick box for grep which can be toggled, why not have one for wildcard as *, job sorted task achieved 5 seconds later every one back to work, nobody wasting more of their lives than necessary on the time-sink that computers seem to be today, in terms of productivity.

Except that wildcards will not solve mildly complex problems and then you'll have to spend not 2 days but actually more like 2 hours in the extremely well written user manual.

I learned regular expressions 20 years ago in BBEdit Lite (which turned into TextWrangler and will come back soon) and it opened an horizon of problems I was then able to solve by myself, without wasting time asking on forums.

And, no, regular expressions are not 20 more times complicated and confusing to learn.


Jean-Christophe Helary
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http://mac4translators.blogspot.com @brandelune