text replace and SpecialCharacters

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4 total messages Started by Siegfried_Kauschat Fri, 30 Jan 2009 09:23

#1548

Author: Siegfried_Kauschat
Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2009 09:23

12 lines
1218 bytes

Hi, I'm using xml-rules to place xml-content into my document. My problem is to replace paragraph breaks in an element by forced line breaks. I tried:

      with (element) { app.findGrepPreferences = app.changeGrepPreferences =
      null; app.findGrepPreferences.findWhat = "\r"; app.changeGrepPreferences.changeTo
      = SpecialCharacters.FORCED_LINE_BREAK; changeGrep(false); }




Error: changeTo expects a String or NothingEnum but SpecialCharacters.FORCED_LINE_BREAK seems to be a number. Does anyone know a workaround?

Btw: insertTextAsContent(SpecialCharacters.FORCED_LINE_BREAK, XMLElementPosition.beforeElement) works fine - but it's not what I want.

Re: text replace and SpecialCharacters

#1549

Author: jongware
Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2009 10:29

3 lines
1067 bytes

findWhat and changeTo expect the same syntax as in the UI, that is, regular text strings with special characters escaping and wildcarding the same way. A Forced Line Break in regular Find (findTextPreferences) is "^n" and in GREP mode "\n" (findGrepPreferences).

Take notice of proper backslash escaping; because you are programming in JavaScript, the backslash (as GREP Escape character) needs to be escaped (as JavaScript Escape character). You missed that one in your '\r' sample.

Re: text replace and SpecialCharacters

#1550

Author: Siegfried_Kauschat
Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2009 12:29

11 lines
967 bytes


      Take notice of proper backslash escaping




That's it, thank you!

JS-"\r" works accidentally because Indesign treats this JS-generated line break the same way than the escape sequence backslash-r (written "\\r" in JS).
But "\n" has a different effect than "\\n" so your hint made my day.

Re: text replace and SpecialCharacters

#1569

Author: Olav_Kvern
Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:28

15 lines
1420 bytes

Hi Siegfried,

re:

app.changeGrepPreferences.changeTo = SpecialCharacters.FORCED_LINE_BREAK;

...won't work, because you don't enter a forced line break in the Find What field of the Find/Change panel. Instead, you enter a metacharacter--so you also use a metacharacter when you perform the task from scripting. This is what jongware's saying (thanks jongware!), but I thought I'd expand on it a bit.

In short: Don't use special characters enumerations in Find/Change. Sometimes, it'll work (when the characters are visible, non-control characters), sometimes it won't.

Other than the need to enter escape characters (to produce valid JavaScript strings), The Find What and Change To properties of all of the find/change preferences objects exactly mimic the corresponding fields in the Find/Change panel.

Thanks,

Ole

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