Hi everyone, and thanks for all of the suggestions. As sometimes happens, just writing down the question, and reading some suggestions, led me to re-think the problem. In fact I had almost solved it, but had a special case that failed. It's a longish story but it comes down to having an AppleScript that did a ton of text processing via BBEdit, and Step 1 was to change certain text from upper or mixed case to lower.
I'd already figured out how to skip the URLs, or so I thought-- but, when I was faced with text that looked like THIS-AND-THAT my Step 1 (change to lower case) failed. I was asking here for a new way to avoid changing the URLs, which sometimes have hyphens, when instead I should have been looking at how I found the text that I wanted to change. What I found was that my "find what" was NOT finding text that had a leading hyphen. It was finding text that had a leading space, or carriage return, or period, etc.-- but not a leading hyphen. So, rather than start over with a new method all I had to do was add "|(- +)" to what I was looking for. A lot simpler than what I was trying to do, which amounted to reinventing the whole thing. It is funny how it all becomes clear, sometimes. Anyhow, thank you. I learned a lot from your responses. c On May 23, 12:52 pm, Webmaster <[email protected]> wrote: > At 7:24 AM -0700 on 5/22/11, ChristianBoyce wrote: > > > Thanks for this. Now, how to tell BBEdit to leave > > everything that is between angle brackets alone? I know how to > > deal with the "greedy" matching-- but the problem is, I want to > > change everything that does NOT match. > > I can find <.*?>, but that's not what I want to change to lower > > case. I want to change everything else. Maybe I should look the > > other way around: > > .*?< and just do a special case for the top of the document. > > All of a sudden I think this is solving itself. > > c > > Christian, I no longer have the previous messages from this > thread in my email client; so can you please provide me with > a clear example -- angle brackets included -- so that I can > see exactly what it is that you are trying to accomplish. > > Show me what it should look like before applying grep, and > what it should look like after applying grep. > > I am still quite new at using grep patterns myself, but I > will try to help. There are a number of grep gurus here who > are much more experienced with this kind of stuff than I am. > In fact, even the little I understand now was learned from > Patrick W. and others here, so I take no credit for it. :) > > WW -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "BBEdit Talk" discussion group on Google Groups. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at <http://groups.google.com/group/bbedit?hl=en> If you have a feature request or would like to report a problem, please email "[email protected]" rather than posting to the group. Follow @bbedit on Twitter: <http://www.twitter.com/bbedit>
