Thread: Find and Replace doesn't work.

Let's assume you've written a short story in the first person. And let's further assume you decide to change it to third person. So there's about a brazillion instances of "I" to be replaced with Toby or Emma or whoever. So what do you do? You fire up your trusty Find and Replace, type "I" in Find, type Toby or Emma or whoever in Replace, and click Replace All.

Aaaaargh.

Every instance of the letter i is now replaced with a name. You fTobynTobysh up wTobyth somethTobyng lTobyke thTobys.

Okay. No biggie. Just reverse the process.

But somehow you type a lower case i instead of an Upper Case I, in Replace.

Again, it should be no big deal. Just Replace the lower case i with Upper Case I. Easy-peasy.

Except that now every single instance of the letter i in the story is an Upper Case I, whether it's needed or not.

And that, dear frIends, cannot be fIxed with FInd and Replace. You are stuck wIth goIng through the entIre story, word by word, laborIously deletIng every unneeded I, and replacIng It with an I.

Phooey.

Or, you just revert to a backup. You are keeping incrimental backups, right?

Or, you don't look for I, you look for a regular expression (RegEx) that matches whitespace or punctuation, Capital I, then another whitespace or punctuation. Alternatively, you just re-write your story. Having dealt with regexes for software development, re-writing is preferrable.

Ohhh my. >.< That sounds like a nightmare to sort out.

Thanks for my laugh of the week, OX.

It's not funny, I know. I sympathise. Another fault in a program replete with them. Someone should kidnap Bill Gates and force him to make a decent word processor.

next time use edit/undo replace all

actually, looks like you can use undo for more than a single step, so maybe there's still hope.

I will keep my mouth shut and say nothing.

But if I were to open my mouth it would be to say that if you use Notepad you never have this kind of problem because you would not expect the computer to do that sort of thing. You would go through and manually find and replace the I with Bob, using that as a good exercise to pick up nits. And your backup would be on the same screen as the file you are revising in a window marked 'story original' and the revised file in a window next to it marked 'story revision a'. You could have a third window open for notes about Bob as you see the need for changes as you go from 1st to objective pov. And maybe a fourth window open for miscellaneous notes about the story - venue, time, and such. Every ten minutes or so you would use your higher level cognitive abilities to remember to go around the circle and save each file both to the drive where you started and to a physically separate drive so that a system crash will not wipe you out.

But I won't say anything. I'll just sit here and keep my mouth shut and think to myself, 'here's another reason not to use a word processor while writing.'

But if you didn't use a word processor, you'd still have to replace "I" with "Bob" in your notepad, Garza. Which would be every bit as laborious as doing it in Word. There is a way around this, of course: Don't change from third-person to first-person in the middle of writing a story. But, after all, it is OX we're talking about here.

You have a good point. Whether you use a word processor or not, making a substantive change in the midst of the piece is going to create a problem. Perhaps giving more thought to what is desired before the writing begins would give the writer an easier time of it, no matter what system he chooses to use.

Originally Posted by garza

You have a good point. Whether you use a word processor or not, making a substantive change in the midst of the piece is going to create a problem. Perhaps giving more thought to what is desired before the writing begins would give the writer an easier time of it, no matter what system he chooses to use.

The number of "..." posts will tell you that giving thought to what's written and planning aren't high up on the list with a certain member.

Don't you use pronouns when you write in third person?

Yes Joe, that came into it too. I just left out the mess caused by attempting to replace ‘my’ with ‘his’, in order to keep this post simple.

Heh. Not that your problem wouldn't have occurred, but I think I would have tried substituting "he" for "I." I don't tend to use the name much, I don't think. Just when I need to break up the repetition. That's more what I was referring to.

garza - They must breed people with a different level of visual acuity in southern central Mississippi. If I open only two windows at once on my monitor I need to scrinch my eyelids together to read the type. Three, and I’m Mr Magoo. Four is out of the question. Or do you perhaps have a 42" flat screen digital TV hooked up to your computer?

My desktop computers each have 15 inch screens, and the little Acer which I carry on the road and which I happen to be using now has a 12 inch screen. I'm very near-sighted and anything over a 15 inch screen is uncomfortable for me to use. The various files don't need to show a lot of copy on the screen at once. I use 10pt typeface in the active file, the one where I'm writing, and 8pt in the others. On this computer the default typeface comes out as about 8pt. Also, you don't need to have all the files showing fully. You can bring to the front the one you want to refer to or to write to, then send it back just by clicking on another file. The system allows me to organise what I'm working on far better than having just the one file open.

Ah, yes, I knew all that, but I have the attention span of a goldfish, and so need two versions open side-by-side if I am to make comparisons.