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M
Microphonic
Known Participant
October 8, 2018
Answered

Find and Replace Question (' to ")

  • October 8, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 394 views

Hi All,

I have an entire UK novel which needs every single speech mark (') changed to (") for the US edition.

The problem is, if I just run a find (') and replace with ("), it's going to change all the apostrophes in the novel too; so (it's) would become (it"s), which is wrong, of course.

Is there any script that could change just the speech marks and not the apostrophes?

Perhaps it could work on any (') with a letter immediately after, but leave ones with a letter before and after alone?

For example, speech marks will always start immediately after a space, but have no space immediately after: (She said, 'yes, good idea'). Whereas apostrophes will have no space immediately before or after: (it's).

Does that make any sense? Could that rule be used to create a custom find and replace that achieves my goal?

Thanks for any advice.

Sam

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer SJRiegel

the second one has a letter before, but not after. (Unless it has a period or other punctuation before) 

There may be a way to make this all one search, but I think it might be easier to do this in three steps:

First do one search that turns all of your apostrophes into a different color.

Then do Find and Replace that only looks for and changes only the black ones to double marks. 

Finally, change all of the colorful apostrophes back to black.

1 reply

S
SJRiegelCorrect answer
Legend
October 8, 2018

the second one has a letter before, but not after. (Unless it has a period or other punctuation before) 

There may be a way to make this all one search, but I think it might be easier to do this in three steps:

First do one search that turns all of your apostrophes into a different color.

Then do Find and Replace that only looks for and changes only the black ones to double marks. 

Finally, change all of the colorful apostrophes back to black.

M
MicrophonicAuthor
Known Participant
October 10, 2018

Thanks for your reply, I will give this a go

Sam

Bill Silbert
Community Expert
Bill SilbertCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 10, 2018

I've usually done this by doing a first Find and Replace for the left quote using a space and a single quote in the Find field and a space and a double quote in the replace field. The second Find and Replace would be a single quote and a space in the Find field and a double quote and a space in the Replace field. I would follow these with four more Finds and Replace for the right quote using a question mark, exclamation point, colon and semi-colon instead of a space after the single quote in the find field. It may also be necessary to do one with an em-dash after the single quote.

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