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zeedale
Participant
July 8, 2010
Question

How to search for brackets in wildcards?

  • July 8, 2010
  • 1 reply
  • 2671 views

Is there any way to search for ALL characters (including punctuation, dashes, and spaces) that are within brackets [ ], including the brackets? For example, after wildcard searching, I would like ALL of  [test1123 abc 7.77]  or [aaa 3_1 abc 7.77] to be highlighted (including the brackets) so that I could make them as conditional text.


What is the proper wildcard search string that I should enter? Thanks.

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    1 reply

    Michael_Müller-Hillebrand
    Michael_Müller-Hillebrand
    Legend
    July 8, 2010

    zeedale,

    There is no simple, one-shot solution from within FrameMaker. The Wildcard option does not give you a full-fledged regular expression search engine, although that would be nice. The official explanation of wildcard character options is here:

    http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FrameMaker/9.0/Using/WSd817046a44e105e21e63e3d11ab7f7862b-7ff6.html

    One thing could be more precise in the docs: * is for one or more word characters, like | stands for one or more non-word characters.

    To achieve your goal I would suggest to do as follows:

    • To find all one-word instances, search for \[*\] - you have to use \[ for each literal [ because the brackerts are special characters as soon as the Wildcard option is selected
    • To find two-word instances, search for \[*|*\], etc.

    HTH,

    - Michael

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