10: Find and Replace

Here is Textpad's 'find and replace' box. 

We open it by using F8.

You'll notice that most of the options are the same as ''find' - see post 7 for an explanation of these. There are some differences: 

No wrapped search. 'Find next' only works downwards to the end of the file.

Selected text. You can highlight some text, and make changes in the highlighted text only. 

What we're interested in here are the Go buttons. Once you've typed what you want to find into the 'Find' box, choose between:

Find next Finds the next occurence of what's in the 'find what' box

Replace Replaces the current selection with what's in the 'replace with' box

Replace next Replaces the next match of the 'find what' box' with what's in the 'replace with' box

Replace all Replaces every single match of the 'find what' box' with what's in the 'replace with' box

You will almost always use Replace all.

1. The point of the thing

This blog is intended as a training guide for people who wrangle metadata. 

More specifically, it's aimed at people who wrangle tab-separated metadata and have noticed that excel has it's limits. People who have noticed that one of those limits is that excel dirties up their data.

This blog is for anyone who has ever spent more than twenty minutes replacing formatting in a spreadsheet by hand because 'find and replace' couldn't do it for them.

It's for anyone who ever wondered why, if computers can calculate astral trajectories and find websites about knitting traditions in Shetland and everything else, they can't manage to make bulk changes on a perfectly simple set of data.

They can, and it's easy.