In Pages, how to search and replace text involving invisible characters?

In Pages documents, how to search and replace text involving invisible characters, colors and font sizes—a task which is so easy in Mircosoft Word?

I read that an older version of Pages allowed users to enter special characters in the search/replace fields, but this did not work for me.
Here: http://www.macworld.com/article/1156533/pagesspecialcharacters.html
I still am looking for a way to do this.

Similar Messages

Search and Replace text

Apologies for what is no doubt a simple question - I'm trying to help out IT and I'm not a programmer, although maybe one day...
Anyway, I'm going to need to read a text file, and search for a string in that text file and replace it. I see "replace" as a function but I'm not familiar with how to use it. Poking around I found <cffile action=append> and used that to add a line to a text document. (Just a notepad .txt)
Ultimately I'll need to unzip a folder, search and replace the string in a specific file in there, and then re-zip the file, but we'll get to that later. I managed to unzip a folder already, that's easy enough. Putting it all together is my current challenge.
I'm using ColdFusion Builder 2.0
Thanks for any help you guys can give.

file.txt: Contains several lines that all say "All Work And No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy".
<cffile action="read" file="C:\file.txt" variable="myFile">
<cfset myFile = Replace(myFile,"Dull","Bored","all")>
<cffile action="write" file="C:\file.txt" output="#myFile#" addnewline="no" fixnewline="no">
<cffile action="read" file="C:\file.txt" variable="myNewFile">
<cfoutput>#myNewFile#</cfoutput>
^_^

How to search and replace in an xml file using java

Hi all,
I am new to java and Xml Programming.
I have to search and replace a value Suresh with some other name in the below xml file.
Any help of code in java it is of great help,and its very urgent.
I am using java swings for generating two text boxes and a button but i am not able to search in the xml file thru the values that are entered into these text boxes.
Thanks in advance.
**XML File*
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<student>
<stud_name>Suresh</stud_name>
<stud_age>40</stud_age>
</student>Also i am using SAX Parser in the java program
any help of code or any tutorials for sax parisng is very urgent please help me to resolve this problem
Edited by: Karthik84 on Aug 19, 2008 1:45 AM
Edited by: Karthik84 on Aug 19, 2008 3:15 AM

Using XPath to locate the elements you are after is very easy.
Try something like this:
import java.io.File;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import javax.xml.transform.Transformer;
import javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory;
import javax.xml.transform.dom.DOMSource;
import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamResult;
import javax.xml.xpath.XPath;
import javax.xml.xpath.XPathConstants;
import javax.xml.xpath.XPathFactory;
import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.w3c.dom.NodeList;
import org.xml.sax.InputSource;
public class BasicXMLReplaceWithDOM4J {
     static String inputFile = "C:/student.xml";
     static String outputFile = "C:/studentRenamed.xml";
     public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
          // Read xml and build a DOM document
          Document doc = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance()
                    .newDocumentBuilder().parse(new InputSource(inputFile));
          // Use XPath to find all nodes where student is named 'Suresh'
          XPath xpath = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath();
          NodeList nodes = (NodeList)xpath
               .evaluate("//stud_name[text()='Suresh']", doc, XPathConstants.NODESET);
          // Rename these nodes
          for (int idx = 0; idx < nodes.getLength(); idx++) {
               nodes.item(idx).setTextContent("Suresh-Renamed");
          // Write the DOM document to the file
          Transformer xformer = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer();
          xformer.transform(new DOMSource(doc), new StreamResult(new File(outputFile)));
}- Roy

Global Search and Replace for Scrambled/Garbled Characters

So I exported a bunch (over 3000) contacts from my Outlook on Windows by using Outlook2Mac, and also tried just using a straight CSV export. But the Chinese characters came out all garbled, and I no longer have the use of that Windows machine anymore.
Here's an example:
Name: ∂¿¨¸™K (May Huang)
Job Title: ±M§·∏g≤z
Dept: ¿Á∑~≥B/ODM∑~∞»≥°
Company: ®Ù•ﬂ∞Íª⁄
Address:
§≠™—∂m§≠≈v§≠∏Ù15∏π
•x•_ø§
•x∆W
I figure I can slowly piece together most of it by doing lots of global search and replaces -- for instance, "•x∆W" should be "台灣" (Taiwan) -- and changing each characters I know one by one.
Problem is, I can't figure out how to do a find and replace! Can anyone help me out?
Thanks in advance!
PowerBook G4 17 Mac OS X (10.4.5)

But for the sake of getting a solution to the
original problem, I wasn't able to export the vCards
from AddressBook and then do what you said. For some
reason, I couldn't open the .vcf file in TextEdit;
kept telling me that the file wasn't encoded in
"Traditional Chinese (Windows, DOS)" format.
You need to use the Open dialogue in TextEdit and open the .vcf in something that it will accept. When you export the stuff from Address book, it indeed is not in Trad Chinese.
I don't have your stuff, so I can't be exactly sure, but it should work something like this. You export everything from Address Book. Use the Open dialogue of TextEdit to open the file, probably as UTF-8. Save as MacRoman. Open again as Trad Chinese (Windows). Save as UTF-8. Reimport. You may need to experiment to find what works right.

How to find and replace text in Excel with Automator

I am new to Automator. And I would like some help how I can create a service that will allow me to find and replace certain text in Excel. I noticed that there is an action to do this for Word documents, but not for Excel document.
Any suggestions how I can do this?
Thanks so much for your help.

Easiest way to do it is the following:
- Open the PDF file in Acrobat.
- Go to Tools - Forms - More Form Options - Export Data.
- Save the form data as an XML file somewhere on your system.
- Open XML the file in a plain-text editor (I recommend Notepad++).
- Let's say you want to replace all the years in the dates from "2013" to "2014". Do a global Search&Replace of "2013-" to "2014-" (I added the dash just to make sure that only date fields are edited).
- Save the XML file (maybe under a new name).
- Go back to the PDF file, and now go to Tools - Forms - More Form Options - Import Data.
- Select the edited XML file and import it.
- Done!

How to search and replace a string in Excel Shape (textbox) using Powershell.

I have been asked to write a PS script to search/replace a string when found in Excel Shapes when they are textboxes. I have seen lots of simplistic PS scripts and even I can do a "foreach" loop through all the Shapes on a Sheet and display the
Name of each Shape. But I have not found a property or method to expose the actual text in a textbox let alone change it.
I have seen vba script that does this as:
Set xWs = Application.ActiveWorkbook.Worksheets(I)
For Each shp In xWs.Shapes
xValue = shp.TextFrame.Characters.Text
shp.TextFrame.Characters.Text = VBA.Replace(xValue, xFindStr, xReplace, 1)
Next
In Powershell, shp.TextFrame.Characters.Text is ignored and returns nothing. It would be nice to know if this is possible in PS and if so, know how to do it and/or get an example to work from. I would have thought that
PS and VB would use the same Excel object model but apparently they do not.
I am using Excel 14.0 and PS 3.
Any suggestions would be appreciated,
Michael

This didn't work for me. I have the shape object and it shows the textframe property:
PS C:\> $shape | gm
TypeName: System.__ComObject#{00024439-0000-0000-c000-000000000046}
Name MemberType Definition
Apply Method void Apply ()
CanvasCropBottom Method void CanvasCropBottom (float)
SoftEdge Property SoftEdgeFormat SoftEdge () {get}
TextEffect Property TextEffectFormat TextEffect () {get}
TextFrame Property TextFrame TextFrame () {get}
TextFrame2 Property TextFrame2 TextFrame2 () {get}
ThreeD Property ThreeDFormat ThreeD () {get}
But trying to access it gives an error:
PS C:\> $shape.textframe | gm
gm : You must specify an object for the Get-Member cmdlet.
At line:1 char:20
+ $shape.textframe | gm
+ ~~
+ CategoryInfo : CloseError: (:) [Get-Member], InvalidOperationException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : NoObjectInGetMember,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.GetMemberCommand
PS C:\> $shape.TextFrame.Characters().text="hello"
You cannot call a method on a null-valued expression.
At line:1 char:1
+ $shape.TextFrame.Characters().text="hello"
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : InvalidOperation: (:) [], RuntimeException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : InvokeMethodOnNull
I hope this post has helped!

[Forum FAQ] How to find and replace text strings in the shapes in Excel using Windows PowerShell

Windows PowerShell is a powerful command tool and we can use it for management and operations. In this article we introduce the detailed steps to use Windows PowerShell to find and replace test string in the
shapes in Excel Object.
Since the Excel.Application
is available for representing the entire Microsoft Excel application, we can invoke the relevant Properties and Methods to help us to
interact with Excel document.
The figure below is an excel file:
Figure 1.
You can use the PowerShell script below to list the text in the shapes and replace the text string to “text”:
$text = “text1”,”text2”,”text3”,”text3”
$Excel
= New-Object -ComObject Excel.Application
$Excel.visible = $true
$Workbook
= $Excel.workbooks.open("d:\shape.xlsx")
#Open the excel file
$Worksheet
= $Workbook.Worksheets.Item("shapes")
#Open the worksheet named "shapes"
$shape = $Worksheet.Shapes
# Get all the shapes
$i=0
# This number is used to replace the text in sequence as the variable “$text”
Foreach ($sh in $shape){
$sh.TextFrame.Characters().text
# Get the textbox in the shape
$sh.TextFrame.Characters().text =
$text[$i++]
#Change the value of the textbox in the shape one by one
$WorkBook.Save()
#Save workbook in excel
$WorkBook.Close()
#Close workbook in excel
[void]$excel.quit()
#Quit Excel
Before invoking the methods and properties, we can use the cmdlet “Get-Member” to list the available methods.
Besides, we can also find the documents about these methods and properties in MSDN:
Workbook.Worksheets Property (Excel):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff835542(v=office.15).aspx
Worksheet.Shapes Property:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff821817(v=office.15).aspx
Shape.TextFrame Property:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff839162(v=office.15).aspx
TextFrame.Characters Method (Excel):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff195027(v=office.15).aspx
Characters.Text Property (Excel):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff838596(v=office.15).aspx
After running the script above, we can see the changes in the figure below:
Figure 2.
Please click to vote if the post helps you. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Thank you for the information, but does this thread really need to be stuck to the top of the forum?
If there must be a sticky, I'd rather see a link to a page on the wiki that has links to all of these ForumFAQ posts.
EDIT: I see this is no longer stuck to the top of the forum, thank you.
Don't retire TechNet! -
(Don't give up yet - 13,085+ strong and growing)

Search and Replace text in file using PowerShell

I want to schedule a script in PowerShell to search a directory for an XML file for a particular text string and replace it with a different text string and then save the file with the same name, the name of the file
will change each time the script is run on a daily basis. There will only be one XML file in the location when the scheduled script is run.
I have never used PowerShell but am familiar with batch file commands, can anyone please help!!
KevinS

Hi Kevin,
I’m writing to just check in to see if the suggestions were
helpful. If you need further help, please feel free to reply this post directly so we will be notified to follow it up.
If you have any feedback on our support, please
click here.
Best Regards,
Anna
TechNet Community Support

Search and replace formulas with AppleScript

Thanks to this forum I've found out that it is possible to search and replace text by other text or formulas with AppleScript in Numbers 3.2
Does anybody have a script to search and replace a formula or a part of a formula by another formula or a partial formula.
For example:
I would like to be able to find:
= Table1::$b$3
and replace this by:
= Table1::$b$4

De Signature,
Would this approach work for you...
This is a very neat way edit a complex formula in a single cell....
a) Copy and Paste the formula to a new black page in Pages,
b) Do your Find and Replace, then
c) Copy and Paste the formulae back into the cell in Numbers.
It works like a charm.
Here is an example of how I used this approach...
Original cell formulae:
=AVERAGE(
SMALL(OFFSET(K3,1,0,20,1),1),SMALL(OFFSET(K3,1,0,20,1),2),
SMALL(OFFSET(K3,1,0,20,1),3),SMALL(OFFSET(K3,1,0,20,1),4),
SMALL(OFFSET(K3,1,0,20,1),5),SMALL(OFFSET(K3,1,0,20,1),6),
SMALL(OFFSET(K3,1,0,20,1),7),SMALL(OFFSET(K3,1,0,20,1),8))
Final version of formulae:
=AVERAGE(
SMALL(OFFSET(K3,N1,0,20,1),1),SMALL(OFFSET(K3,N1,0,20,1),2),
SMALL(OFFSET(K3,N1,0,20,1),3),SMALL(OFFSET(K3,N1,0,20,1),4),
SMALL(OFFSET(K3,N1,0,20,1),5),SMALL(OFFSET(K3,N1,0,20,1),6),
SMALL(OFFSET(K3,N1,0,20,1),7),SMALL(OFFSET(K3,N1,0,20,1),8))
Find Replace: be cautious with the Find, to ensure it is unique, in my this example ",1,", to avoid changing the" ,1)"
Enjoy...

[JS] About Search and replace

Hello,
Can anyone tell me how to Search and replace in a document using javascript.
I want to replace ?? to 5.
Thank you,
--Avi

doc.findTextPreferences.findWhat="??";
doc.changeTextPreferences.changeTo="5";
doc.changeText();

Search and replace for Unicode characters

Hello,
I have a function which searches and replaces characters on file. It works with ASCI sharacters, but not when the strings which needs to be replaced contains Unicode ('á', 'ā') etc. The source file is codding
utf8 .
$file = "file.txt"
$SearchReplace = @($file)
#Process files by performing a search and replace
foreach ($file in $SearchReplace)
#Select-Object -Skip 1 |
(Get-Content $file) |
Foreach-object { $_ -replace 'unicode_string' , ';' } |
out-file -encoding Unicode $file
How to get working the search (and replace) function with Unicode characters?
Thanks!

No. it does not. I have verified that script does not recognize the diacritic
('á',
'ā') characters when at all the operations with the files I have specified encoding utf-8/Unicode.

How do I search and replace for invisibles in Pages 5.5.2?

Three related problems all involving search and replace for invisibles.
1. A block of text where all double returns need to become single returns.
2. A block of text where all returns need to be replaced with a single word space.
3. A block of text where all double word spaces to be replaced with a single word space.
Pages 09 could do all three this handily. How can these be done in Pages 5.5.2?
Appreciated.

Here are screenshot of my attempts to make reducing double returns to one. First up selection of a double return:
Copy to the clipboard. Do a Command-F. Here's the resulting dialogue:
I paste in the contents of the clipboard:
Note the Search field no longer has an empty slot selected. Something is clearly in there, but no instance of whatever is has been found. Nevertheless, I proceed to set up the Replace field by selecting a single return:
Copy that to the clipboard and paste into the Replace field:
Nothing to search for and therefore nothing to replace. Am now wondering what that little scoop to the right of the eyeglass icon might indicate. Clicking on it reveals this:
Definitely not "a solution that just works."

How do I search and replace in comments in Acrobat XI?

I use a Mac and just downloaded Acrobat Pro XI specifically to search and replace phrases in comments in a large PDF. According to this Adobe Help page, I should be able to do this: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/searching-pdfs.html I copied the relevant section below and marked with ***. However, I don't see I don't see an arrow for the options that would allow me to include comments. I understand how to include the comments with advanced search, but I want to also replace text. I also checked in preferences and searched the forums. Could someone please advise and maybe include a screenshot, if possible. Thanks!
Choose Edit > Find (Ctrl/Command+F).
Type the text you want to search for in the text box on the Find toolbar.
To replace text, click Replace With to expand the toolbar, then type the replacement text in theReplace With text box.
(Optional) Click ***the arrow ***next to the text box and choose one or more of the following:
Whole Words Only
Finds only occurrences of the complete word you type in the text box. For example, if you search for the word stick, the words tick and sticky aren’t found.
Case-Sensitive
Finds only occurrences of the words that match the capitalization you type. For example, if you search for the word Web, the words web and WEB aren’t found.
Include Bookmarks
Also searches the text in the Bookmarks panel.
***Include Comments***
Also searches the text of any comments.

Here are screenshot of my attempts to make reducing double returns to one. First up selection of a double return:
Copy to the clipboard. Do a Command-F. Here's the resulting dialogue:
I paste in the contents of the clipboard:
Note the Search field no longer has an empty slot selected. Something is clearly in there, but no instance of whatever is has been found. Nevertheless, I proceed to set up the Replace field by selecting a single return:
Copy that to the clipboard and paste into the Replace field:
Nothing to search for and therefore nothing to replace. Am now wondering what that little scoop to the right of the eyeglass icon might indicate. Clicking on it reveals this:
Definitely not "a solution that just works."

How can I search and replace fonts?

iOS 7 doesn't support the Adobe workhorse fonts I've most relied on for years, and arbitrarily changes them to iOS built-in fonts when I link my standard documents and templates to the iPhone, via iCloud. There's no apparent logic to how it does this; a Pages document in Minion Pro, a serif font, gets changed to the sans-serif Helvetica. Myriad Pro may come out in Times New Roman. I accept that the iPhone's limited number of fonts makes translation necessary, but does Pages offer a way in which I can search and replace inappropriately substituted fonts for more logical alternatives?

You noticed the first one yourself: the Found item list seems to randomly jump around the document -- I believe you are correct in your observation it may be due to the object construction order. That tells me, by the way, something about your lot numbers that tou didn't mention: your text is not one continuous long threaded story, but it's all or partially in disconnected etxt frames. The Found list does return everything inside a single story in the correct order, but it goes over each separate story in the order they were constructed.
The only solution is to gather all of your lot numbers, *re-sort* them according to the page number they appear on (and some sort of Worst Case Scenario is when you might have more than one lot number frame per page; in that case you also need to sort by textframe, top to bottom -- yet even worse is if you also may have these textframes side by side!).
Only then you have a reliable counting order.
This isn't too bad. We can just extend the method I offered for sorting top-to-bottom/left-to-right in Re: Working around the frame selection order issue in CS 4 and make it also include page numbers:
function byPageYX(a,b) {
    var
        aP = a.parentTextFrames[0].parentPage.index,
        bP = b.parentTextFrames[0].parentPage.index,
        aY = a.baseline[0],
        bY = b.baseline[0],
        aX = a.horizontalOffset[1],
        bX = b.horizontalOffset[1],
        dP = aP-bP,
        dy = aY-bY,
        dx = aX-bX;
    return dP?dP:(dy?dy:dx);
myResults.sort(byPageYX);
Or something like that.
As for actually implementing the above I cannot be of any help with Applescript.
Once we're dealing with sorting I think you're much better off in Javascript anyhow.

Search and Replace in Pages 5

Search and Replace in Pages is now seriously regressive. Previously I could search for "invisibles" in a document and globally replace the search "invisible" by a replace one. Now I can't find a way of doing that. Any suggestions?

Try this:
Turn on Show Invisibles in the View menu.
Select (highlight) the double para breaks.
Use Command-E (Find using selected text).
Open the Find dialogue box (Command-F) and select Find & Replace.The selected para breaks will be in the Find text entry box, but will not be visible!
Click in the Replace text entry box.
Select (highlight) a single para break.
Go to the Edit menu / Find and select 'Use selection for replace' (it will not show in the Replace entry box).
In the Find & Replace dialogue box, click on the Forward or Back arrows to highlight the selected items (e.g. double para break) where you wish to start replacing in the document.
Use the Replace All / Replace & Find / Replace buttons as per usual.
Not a nice solution, but I hope it gets you going until Apple restores the previous functionality!

In Pages, how to search and replace text involving invisible characters?

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