Hussein Shafie schrieb:
> Yves Forkl wrote:
>> > How to enter some character which is unavailable on the keyboard into
>> > the search field? [...]
> It depends on the character you want to search and on the operating
> system you are running:
>
> --> If you search a newline, specify "\n" and turn on "Regular expression".
>
> Similarly, you can specify:
>
> \\ The backslash character
> \0n The character with octal value 0n (0 <= n <= 7)
> \0nn The character with octal value 0nn (0 <= n <= 7)
> \0mnn The character with octal value 0mnn (0 <= m <= 3, 0 <= n <= 7)
> \xhh The character with hexadecimal value 0xhh
> \uhhhh The character with hexadecimal value 0xhhhh
> \t The tab character ('\u0009')
> \n The newline (line feed) character ('\u000A')
> \r The carriage-return character ('\u000D')
> \f The form-feed character ('\u000C')
> \a The alert (bell) character ('\u0007')
> \e The escape character ('\u001B')
Thank you very much, Hussein. I wasn't aware of this feature of XXE,
which seems a bit hidden: neither the Online Help nor the User's Guide
mention this way of searching for special characters as RegExps. (A bit
on the same line: Where to find information about the dialect of RegExp
that XXE uses?)
> --> For characters such as rarely used letters and signs, on
> Linux/X-Window, the Compose key is very handy to use. [...]
While this is definitely a very useful method of entering a number of
rather common special characters (I am working since a long time with
the full ISO Latin-1 set mapped to compose key cominations), mapping
every character I might happen to search for in XXE now and then would
of course not make much sense - think of Greek letters, mathematical
symbols and the like.
I would love to be able to select a character from XXE's excellent
character tool and pass it on directly to the search field. In absence
of such a functionality or of a viable workaround, I would like to state
the following as a RFE:
1) The character tool should be enhanced with a function that copies the
selected character to the clipboard instead of inserting it into the
document, for later pasting into the search field. Alternatively, the
search tool could provide access to the character tool within the search
field.
2) Additionally, two macro commands (or one parametricized command)
should be added which act upon the character following the caret in the
current document view and fulfil these purposes:
2.1) Display the hex value of the character's Unicode code point in the
status bar, allowing for unambiguous identification of the character
represented by the displayed glyph (which otherwise is not always easy
for a lot of the Unicode characters).
2.2) Return a string representing the character in "\uhhhh" escape
notation, so it can be inserted e.g. in the search field (probably via
the clipboard) or processed by other commands like insertControlChar.
[Note on a minor error in XXE's documentation, in document "Commands":
In the entry for insertControlChar, the representation for newline
should read "\u000a" rather than "\u0009".]
Yves
--
Yves Forkl M.A.
Softwareentwicklung
SRZ Berlin | Firmengruppe besscom
http://www.srz.de
tel +49 30 75301-335 | fax +49 30 75301-11335
