text replace and SpecialCharacters

Hi Siegfried,

re:

app.changeGrepPreferences.changeTo = SpecialCharacters.FORCED_LINE_BREAK;

...won't work, because you don't enter a forced line break in the Find What field of the Find/Change panel. Instead, you enter a metacharacter--so you also use a metacharacter when you perform the task from scripting. This is what jongware's saying (thanks jongware!), but I thought I'd expand on it a bit.

In short: Don't use special characters enumerations in Find/Change. Sometimes, it'll work (when the characters are visible, non-control characters), sometimes it won't.

Other than the need to enter escape characters (to produce valid JavaScript strings), The Find What and Change To properties of all of the find/change preferences objects exactly mimic the corresponding fields in the Find/Change panel.

Thanks,

Ole

> Take notice of proper backslash escaping

That's it, thank you!

JS-"\r" works accidentally because Indesign treats this JS-generated line break the same way than the escape sequence backslash-r (written "\\r" in JS).
But "\n" has a different effect than "\\n" so your hint made my day.

findWhat and changeTo expect the same syntax as in the UI, that is, regular text strings with special characters escaping and wildcarding the same way. A Forced Line Break in regular Find (findTextPreferences) is "^n" and in GREP mode "\n" (findGrepPreferences).

Take notice of proper backslash escaping; because you are programming in JavaScript, the backslash (as GREP Escape character) needs to be escaped (as JavaScript Escape character). You missed that one in your '\r' sample.