Search and Replace : Java Glossary

Magic Replacement Strings

Tips

• You can disable individual lines of a script,2 or indivdidual file groups. This has two uses.
  1. If you have already done a line, you don’t need to repeat it right away.
  2. If a line in your script does not work the way you expected, turn it off and copy just the beginning of it to a new line. Test that. If it works, add a bit more until you find out the part that is failing.
• You can stop a search by hitting Search on the toolbar or press Ctrl-F. This should work even if you are caught is an error message loop.
• It has a companion configuring utility srconfig.exe. If SR stops working, srconfig.exe will clear the configuration in the registry and get it unstuck.
• You can rename your favourite scripts/favourites with a lead -. They will sort to the top of the menu.
• I recommend configuring it to put its favourites and scripts in some permanent data directory so they will get backed up and so they won’t be lost on reinstall. Here is a script to annotate your CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) file colours adding a comment next to each colour number what X11 colour it 
• Use Quoter to figure out which chars need to be preceded by \ in search and replace regex expressions. It is especially useful to find and replace standard sections of multiline boilerplate.
• You can renumber items with the %n>> operator. You can write scripts to do relatively complex editing tasks on a series of files unattended. It is very quick.
• Use HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) mode for search/replace when you have entities. You work with accented characters and SR automatically replaces them to them entity equivalents.
• When ignore whitespace mode is enabled, it will ignore extra spaces and \r, \n, \t characters between whole words, when it is seaching. On a replace, it replaces all whitespace with a single space. If you want the integrity of the whitespace preserved, use a regex. It does not work by logically hiding all spaces in the search and text before searching.
• When you configure your editor, do it like this: F:\Program Files\vslick\win\vs.exe %PATH% rather than using %1 as you would in Windows.
• It is hard to read the text in the dialog boxes. Copy paste it to and editor where you can view it with a larger, more legible font. You can configure a larger more legible font for the pop-ups in the options. To configure the font for the main panels or the dialog boxes you must use srconfig to select a more readable font, or patch the registry. With the default font is it impossible to tell a , apart from a .
• Trailing spaces in scripts are significant, but they are fragile. If you edit the scripts your text editor it will likely trim trailing spaces. To protect them, use a regex and encode them as \0x20
• If you get Error opening file… message, Turn off Cache File List in Options-General. This may help a bit.

Gotchas

• BE has a bug. You must encode & as 0x26 in regex expressions.
• If a script goes through the motions of replacing, but leaves the files unchanged, check the Expression in the advanced section of the script. It should read E1 OR E2 OR E3 OR E4 OR E5. Clear them and SR will set them correctly. They can be used to suppress replaces on files that don’t have hits on several of your search strings. Read the exampes in the help.
• If your script fails to search subdirs, look at the options in the last page of the script dialog. If you have use program options turned on, it ignores the setting of search subdirs in your script and looks at the toggle state of search directories button.
• If you leave out the space in [Search /i] in a script, Search Replace will crash without error message.
• If your regex expressions are malformed, it will just crash without an error message. Use Quoter to check that you have your \ in the right place in both search and replace expressions.
• Unlike Java regexes, there are no greedy and reluctant quantifiers. Everything is greedy.
• If your [Search /i] and [Replace] are not balanced, Search Replace will crash without error message.
• It is confusing to compose search criteria with excludes because you specify directory excludes in the file mask. Click the … icon to the right of the file selection. There you an add multiple include/exclude directory/file selections relative to the file path selected. Normally you would to the includes first. If you click all, your directory selection in ignored. If you click Any # of levels under start directory the directory will match at any level in the path tree. If you click Also process its subdirectories then all files in the subdirectories of the directory matching will be included/excluded as well. This will be abbreviated to a couple of lines, that once you get the hang of it, that you could code directly,

  e.g. to process all *.html files except ones in the kjv directory tree in the path E:\mindprod you would code file-mask: *.html;~\kjv\*\*.html path: E:\mindprod

Menu Icons

They are stored internally as 16 × 16 sections of a single image. They mean: search, replace, touch, file operations, case sensitivity, search subdirectories, word mode, regex, search zips, ignore whitespace, html mode, view context, copy results, view as HTML, print, script, options, help, about. The icons might look like:

•  (search)
• ! exclamation mark (replace)
• T (touch)
• F (file operations)
• toggles between   (case-sensitive) and   (case-insensitive)
•  (search subdirectories)
• W (word mode]
• […] regex
•  (search zips)
•  to suggest he idea of treating multiple lines as one big string (ignore whitespace)
• &… (html mode)
• V (view context)
• C (copy results)
•  to suggest a bulleted list common in HTML. (view as HTML)
• as now (print)
• as now (script)
• (options)
• ? (help)
•  (about).

Command Line Use

Three Variants

There are now three versions of Search/Replace. The two new ones can still run the old scripts:

Power users might want to use both Studio BE and Studio Pro. You get a massive discount if you do that. All three are trialware, so you can try them out to see which one or which combination best fits your needs. Compare Classic, Pro and Business Editions. The trial version suppresses replaces after the first five, so it is just useful for evaluation, not getting useful work done to properly test it.

I bought bought versions thinking I would use mostly the business edition, but the opposite is true.

The BE and pro versions use a new XML-based script format. This makes it easier to generate scripts and programmatically manipulate scripts. It also regularises the ways of quoting awkward characters. Unfortunately, Funduc did not update the icons for the new versions.

RFE (Request For Enhancement)

These are the improvements would like to see. The most important items are at the top of the list.

1. Java-style postfix regex syntax.
2. Cache results of last N searches so if you repeat a search, it does not need to rescan files that have not changed since last time.
3. Let you pause a search/replace for manual touch-up, then carry on where it left off.
4. An alternate set of icons that are easier for someone with less than perfect vision that are more distinctive and less detailed or a way to let you install your own set of icons.
5. Search expressions separated by | are very slow. Anything over eight expressions in an or list are unusably slow. Oddly, splitting them up into multiple search/replace expressions speeds things up. Other search engines don’t have this problem. The | should be implemented as a finite state machine as is done in parser-generators, so that each new character encountered selects a state that concerns itself with only a narrower set of the possibilities in the or. Another way of looking at the problem is the logic needed is like Boyer-Moore, an algorithm that seaches for several strings simultaneously examining only few of the characters in the data parsed.
6. Let you scroll the results to view them while they are still being generated.
7. The menus should not be scrollable with the mouse buttun. I get far too many false scrolls.

Perhaps if others asked too, they might reconsider.