How to create line breaks after punctuation?

[Stella]

I'm new to TextWrangler, and I copied a long document from Word into
TextWrangler document. It's poetry, and I'm wondering if/how to create
line breaks where the program finds punctuation--ie a comma or period.
Does anyone know the most efficient way to do this? Is it via search
and replace, or via sort lines?

Thanks so much!

[Thomas Humiston]

Sorting is good if you want to re-order the lines. Probably not good for poetry, however.

Try this: In the Find dialog, see that the Grep box is checked.
Search for: [,\.]
Replace with: &\r

The brackets mean "match anything listed here". Since the period (or "dot") has a special meaning in Grep searches -- it's normally used as a wildcard character that'll match anything -- we put a backslash (\) in front of it so TextWrangler knows we actually wish it to match a period only. So the search pattern as a whole says, "match a comma or a period". (You can throw in a semicolon or anything else, too, as needed.)

The replacement pattern says "take what you found (represented by "&") and add a break (\r) after it".

For more, see Help > User Manual > Searching with Grep.

- TH

[Stella]

Thanks so much!