Some special characters cannot be pasted into Search And Replace

[Jim_A]

Some special characters cannot be pasted into Search And Replace, such as Column Break, Page Break, Frame Break. (I haven’t tested all of them.)

 

I can’t see a way to search for these invisible characters.

[walt.farrell]

If the Mac version works like the Windows version does, it's a bit cumbersome, but it can be done.

Here's an example from Windows: in the Find & Replace panel, click the pulldown list under Replace, and select Column Break. That will put the special Column Break character into the Replace field. Select it, and cut it, and then paste it into the Find field.

[walt.farrell]

Actually, it's even easier: Click on the magnifying glass under Find, and there's a pulldown with the special characters that you can select directly.

[Fixx]

I would strongly prefer Find/Replace to use simple copy/pasted invisibles. Sometimes text files contain quite exotic invisibles and this would be an easy way to remove/change them. Sometimes getting rid of those devils is really hard if you cannot search them.

[Kurt J. Meyer]

Can't find what Walt refers to in the Mac version. I have no "magnifying glass under Find". 

What's worse: I can't paste any copied text string into the Find or Replace fields.

Once I have entered a search string manually, I can see some coding for special characters (e.g. "\n\r"), but when I enter that code, it does not find anything.

[Jim_A]

Yes, like Kurt, I can't see a magnifying glass under Find. 

This is a Mac version issue. I've downloaded the PC version running in virtual machine running Windows 10 and the magnifying glass is there.

[ macos Sierra 10.12.6 ]

 

[R C-R]

5 hours ago, Kurt J. Meyer said:

Can't find what Walt refers to in the Mac version. I have no "magnifying glass under Find". 

What's worse: I can't paste any copied text string into the Find or Replace fields.

No magnifying glass under Find here either, but there are some options available from the Gear icon popups. OTOH, I am able to copy & paste text into the Find & Replace fields.

[Wosven]

This "search and replace" panel is a little clumsy for now.

It needs a "search in selected text" option, and other advenced ones;

And more important: if regular expression are use as shown in the result list, we should be able (an option?) to write it, it's more efficient for people knowing regular expressions that searching in a menu (it'll need a cheat list as in other apps depending on possible/implemented expressions and new code for special characters).

[h_d]

Did a bit of experimenting...

I can type \t into the Find box and it's immediately converted to a Tab character:

 

Pasting in a paragraph return finds \n\r, but typing  \n\r into the Find box has no effect - no immediate conversion to a paragraph return symbol and searching returns no results, even in a document with plenty of paragraph marks.

I can paste a "soft return" or line end into and Find box and it searches for <LSEP>, finding soft returns.

 

But typing <LSEP> into the Find box returns nothing:

Pasting a column break (looks like a forward-pointing arrow, also used as a table delimiter) doesn't even change the contents of the Find box. Same with a column break (downward pointing arrow). 

Pasting in a page break (solid downward pointing arrow) appears to add a space (or at least a blank character of some description) to the Find box and returns every justified line ending.

Pasting in an em dash adds a special character to the Find box and finds em dashes.

Hope this helps...