Power Tip: Using variables to Search and Replace in Word

fgh said:

Fr Devin Roza said:

the European format

Please don't call it "the European format". It's as foreign to me as it is to Americans, if not more.

Didn't mean to offend. I've studied theology and Scripture in Europe for 4 years in 2 different universities and have seen this format used very often, almost exclusively in fact. I've never seen it in stuff from the US, however. It seems to be especially common in writings from Romance Languages, although I've seen it used in English writings as well (as in this case). It could be that it's something typical of the Romance Languages more than Europe per se, and which at times makes it into English documents due to the Romance Languages being so present here in Europe.

fgh said:

The better method is to use search and replace to create a tag looking like [[Acts 1,1 >> Acts 1:1]].

If you know a quick way to do this please share. It becomes especially complicated when you get one citation after another, something which the simple solution I proposed handles perfectly (as "complicated references" get a space after the comma when it is not a Scriptural citation). In my case, for example, I replaced 1700 Scriptural citations with a format that Logos understands in a matter of minutes (most of the time being spent going through manually about 50 find and replaces to make sure I wasn't getting false positives), making the document extremely useful within Logos without spending much time. Perfect for many, many scenarios.

BTW, the point of this post was more to share a method to quickly do intelligent search and replace in Word than to propose that this is something valid for every document and every case. As you pointed out, there are times in which this particular search would not be useful. But the goal is to open up peoples eyes so that they can apply the principles here in the scenarios that they encounter.

If you or others want to share more examples of how you would do so in more complicated scenarios I'm sure it could be very helpful.

" rel="nofollow">Keep Smiling 4 Jesus said:

Should have used wildcard search string:

(??bible-on[\}]{2})(??[\@]BibleKJV:[0-9,A-Z]{1,2}[a-z]{1,2}[0-9]{1,3})(:1)([\]]{2})

with replacement

\2\4 \1\2\3\4

Now that, my friends, is a search and replace string! Thanks for sharing KS4J!

James Taylor said:

Fr Devin Roza said:

This technique can also be used to insert the codes which Personal Books need to indicate that a certain heading is, for example, a Dictionary Head Word. If all the head words in your dictionary have the same formatting, in just a matter of a few minutes of work you could apply the information that the Logos Personal Book needs to recognize 1000s of head words.

Have you actually done this Fr Devin Roza? If so, Could you please post a screen shot of the find and replace window as you did for the above example?

I hadn't done it, but I did right now. Here are some test files, and the search. In the test file, the headwords we want to mark up are using Heading 1, which is what I will be replacing with the text Logos/Verbum needs to tell it this is an Encyclopedia headword. When you import the book, be sure to classify it as an encyclopedia.

Original Dictionary file: 5822.Test.docx

Dictionary file ready for Logos/Verbum: 6036.TestResult.docx

Here is the search you need to run to get from the original to the final file. Just click Replace All, and it will do all of them at once:

A few notes about this search:

- The search is for text that is Heading 1, any number of characters or words long, until it hits a carriage return (^13).

- The replace text uses \1 to indicate the variable (everything in between the () in the search string). Note that the replace string uses ^p instead of ^13. This is important, as ^13 does not work correctly in the replace string to indicate a carriage return (^13 doesn't work properly with styles in the replace box). 

James Taylor said:

Fr Devin Roza said:

Glad it worked!!

follow up question...

What would be the best procedure for the following scenario? When a book is set up with the bolded term in the beginnning of the sentence(paragraph) but it's not on a separate line. Using the normal find/replace wildcard syntax above doesn't work because there is no new paragraph following each term. Instead the term just runs into the sentence defining it. Is there a way to tell Word that after a certain font style to cause there to be a new paragraph? If there was I think your previous find/replace syntax for headwords would work.

Yes, that's very possible to do. When you put your cursor in the "Find what" box, and then select the "Special" button, notice that the < indicates the beginning of a word, and > the end of a word. Then, using the "Format" button on the bottom left, you set your format to bold (note there are two places to set it - usually the first one works best for me).

So, to find a single word in Bold, and replace it with that same word in Bold plus Enter, you would replace for:

But a search like this by itself will almost certainly give you problems. The reason is you'll probably have Titles that have more than one word.

So, in these cases what I would do is start with the highest number of words, and work your way down. And, when you replace your text, replace it and change the format to something that's not bold, say Heading 2 or something not used elsewhere in the document, again setting this value using the Format button while your cursor is in the "Replace with" box. That way your subsequent search and replaces won't find it. At the end of the process, you can always change all of them back if you like. 

To search for two words in bold, it would be (<*>) (<*>)

Notice the space between the words. Then the replace string would be \1 \2^p

But start with 3 or 4 words, or however many would be the most. Then one less, and so on, all the way down to 1.