Wild Card Searches

[Peter Gold]

Hi, David:

YEAH! That's what I'm talkin' 'bout!<G>

I'm sure this is documented in pre-FrameMaker 9 online help and hard
copy manuals. I know I've got some older manuals somewhere, but, and
perhaps an installed FrameMaker version that has the complete - such
as it is - documentation on the feature. However, it's a busy time
right now, so I may not be able to get to this soon.

I notice that the Joseph, the OP, is using FM 8. It'll take some
digging through the find or search sections of the FrameMaker 8 Help
and the hard-copy manual, but you should be able to find the table of
how to use these and other notations and some examples.

Thanks for the archived note. I tried Quills' example and it does work
in FrameMaker 9. My earlier failures were due to not turning on
Wildcards. So, the question is "why is all mention of this feature
expunged from the FM 9 docs and help?

HTH

Regards,

Peter
_______________________
Peter Gold
KnowHow ProServices


On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 2:45 PM, David Spreadbury <dspreadb at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Peter,
> First I tried to search the framers archives because there was a discussion
> on this topic a while back, but couldn't find the search function on
> framers.
>
> The following was posted last November by quills at airmail.net, in response to
> a similar question:
>
> << 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 some time 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>>
>
> David Spreadbury
> Sr. Technical Writer
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com
> [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of
> quills at airmail.net
> Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2008 1:41 PM
> To: Joseph; framers at lists.frameusers.com
> Subject: Re: Wild Card Searches
>
> 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
> _______________________________________________