Nisus Writer Express - Manual (Page 216)

196 Proofing Documents
In PowerFind Pro, the backslash changes the meaning of the character or characters that follow it.
For example the character n, is not a metacharacter and has no special meaning. However, \n
represents the New Line character in an expression.
Parenthesized Expressions
Use parentheses in PowerFind Pro Find expressions in the same manner as you do with PowerFind
with these additional guidelines.
The ( ) characters in PowerFind Pro correspond to the Capture expression found in the Match menu
in PowerFind and explained on page 181. For example, the search for (my expression) (where my
expression represents some text such as the airplane) continues as if the ( and ) were not present.
Nisus Writer Express then remembers the matched expression, that is, the Found or Captured#
expression that fits the parameters of the expression my expression. To refer to the first
parenthesized expression again in the Find what expression or in the Replace with expression, use
the metacharacter \1, this is the PowerFind Pro equivalent to PowerFind’s
or
.
Use parentheses to include repeated characters in one expression, then append a repeat
metacharacter such as +. For example, the expression (AB)+ finds AB followed by AB repeated one
or more times in succession.
You can refer to strings of text you have found in any Find expression even within that same Find
expression, but you must first place that segment of the Find expression in parentheses in order to
refer to it later. For example the text:
ABCDEFABGHABabcdABabcdEF
has only five patterns repeated in its twenty-four characters.
{ { { {
{
1 2 3 4 5
ABCDEFABGHABabcdABabcdEF
Figure 173
Repeated text patterns
Nisus Writer Express can find each of these patterns with the Find expression
(AB)([[:upper:]]+?)(EF)\1([[:upper:]]+?)\1([[:lower:]]+?)\1\5\3
Pre-defined Wild Cards
The following metacharacters are predefined wild cards. Each metacharacter finds a character from
a given set. You can choose some of these metacharacters from the Wild Card menu available in the
Find/Replace window. Wild cards are only meaningful when you use them to construct the Find
expression. If you enter them in the replacement pattern, Nisus Writer Express interprets them
literally because they do not represent a unique match.
Wild Card What it Does
\x00-\xff Finds any character except Return <.
[\x00-\xff] Finds any character including a Return; matches any ASCII (Unicode) character
from 0 through 255.
[\x00-\x07\x09-\x0c\x0e-\x1f]
Finds any gremlin; use to clean up database output files or downloaded user
network files; see the Glossary (page 261) for a definition of gremlin.
[\x00-\x0c\x0e-\xif]
A colon followed by a space finds any control character; use this to clean up DOS
files or files downloaded from a network; the ASCII (Unicode) range of the control
characters is from 0 through 31 (except 13, the Return).
[[:alpha:]] Finds any lowercase or uppercase character; the equivalent of the command
AnyLetter ([A-Za-z])in the Wild Card menu, plus all modified alphabetics typed
using the
4 key. This finds any character Unicode considers an alphabetic.
[[:alpha:]_] Finds any alphabetic or diacritical “modified alphabetic,” underscore character
“_” (ASCII (Unicode) 95
_ ). This finds any character Unicode considers an
alphabetic plus the underscore character as used in “file_names” on DOS
machines.
[^[:alpha:]] Finds any non-alphabetic character including the underscore character “_” (ASCII
95
_ ).