Wild Card Searches

[quills at airmail.net]

The Frame search (wild card) feature is based upon grep. It's not a 
real implementation, or a full implementation in any stretch of the 
imagination. It's not fully documented as a search engine because 
it's only a small feature of the program.

However, if you spend sometime studying how grep works, then you will 
understand how Wildcards are used. Think of character patterns.

For instance the bracket wildcard allows you to search for characters 
except those in the brackets when you place a caret at the beginning 
of the string. You can search for specific patterns, or groups of 
patterns.

For instance:

[0-9]*.

Searches for a numerical pattern which can consist of single digits 
or multiple digits ending with a period. If you are replacing or 
removing a manually created list for example. That pattern will find 
1. as well as 100. as both fit the repeating pattern.

You could also search for a alphabetic string with a specific pattern 
and replace it by pasting in a variable.

Scott

At 8:25 AM -0600 11/11/08, Joseph wrote:
>Hi All,
>
>I am using Frame 8 and I would like to take advantage of the wild card
>search functionality.  For example, I discovered that I could strip out
>empty paragraph tags by using \P\p.  Unfortunately, I have not been able to
>find much documentation about this feature.
>
>This leads me to the following questions.
>
>1. Does anyone know some good documentation about creating wild card
>searches in FrameMaker?  I found some basic information about the different
>characters you can use to create one, but very little about constructing
>useful searches.
>2. In addition, what wild card searches does everyone use?
>
>--
>Sincerely,
>
>Joseph Lorenzini