Nisus Writer Pro - Manual (Page 341)

Polishing & Managing Documents 321
Neither of these tasks may seem particularly useful for normal word processing. However, you can
use Nisus Writer Pro as a text processor to manipulate raw text.
!
As illustrated here, you can replace a wide variety of attributes in a Replace with expression.
As explained on page 294 you can find literal text with specific attributes.
You can also search for expressions using metacharacters where attributes are assigned to the first
character in the Find what expression.
However, you cannot search for an expression using metacharacters that uses multiple attributes. In
this instance Nisus Writer Pro removes the attributes it cannot search for and then runs the search.
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 Pro 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 461) 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
_ ).
[^[:alpha:]_] Finds any non-alphabetic character excluding the underscore character “_” (ASCII
95
_ ).
[[:blank:]] Finds either a space (ASCII (Unicode) 32) or a tab (ASCII (Unicode) 9); same as [\s
\t].
\d Finds any digit from 0 through 9; same as menu command AnyDigit ([0-9])from
the Wild Card menu.
[[:xdigit:]] Finds any digit or alphabetic character from a to f; covers the ranges 0-9 a-f A-F;
use to find hexadecimal numerals.
[[:lower:]] Finds any lowercase alphabetic character from a to z plus modified alphabetics;
the equivalent of the command LowercaseLetter ([a-z])in the Wild Card menu.
[[:alnum:]] Finds any alphanumeric character; the equivalent of the command
AnyLetterOrDigit ([A-Za-z0-9]) in the Wild Card menu.
\w Finds any alphanumeric, underscore character; same as [[:alnum:]] but includes
the underscore character.
[[:upper:]] Finds any uppercase alphabetic character in the range A to Z; the equivalent of
the command UppercaseLetter ([A-Z])in the Wild Card menu.
\W Finds any non-alphanumeric character (excluding a Return and an underscore);
opposite of \w.
[[:punct:]] Finds any “punctuation” character such as ( [ send text as rtf | send rtf | rtf | text
as rtf; ( _ @ # % & * \ ? ! ’ ” } ] ).