Text replace and SpecialCharacters

Question

Hi, I'm using xml-rules to place xml-content into my document. My problem is to replace paragraph breaks in an element by forced line breaks. I tried:
> with (element) {
> app.findGrepPreferences = app.changeGrepPreferences = null;
> app.findGrepPreferences.findWhat = "\r";
> app.changeGrepPreferences.changeTo = SpecialCharacters.FORCED_LINE_BREAK;
> changeGrep(false);
> }
Error (CS3): changeTo expects a String or NothingEnum but SpecialCharacters.FORCED_LINE_BREAK seems to be a number. Does anyone know a workaround?
Btw: insertTextAsContent(SpecialCharacters.FORCED_LINE_BREAK, XMLElementPosition.beforeElement) works fine - but it's not what I want.

Answer 1

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