MacOS – Using wildcards in Find and Replace (Mac OS app)

macos

I'm using an app called Scapple which (I think) accesses the built in Find and Replace of Mac OS.

It's a mind map app into which I'm pasting dozens and dozens of paragraphs from Kindle books. Each time you paste from Kindle, it adds the book title and location at the bottom of the pasted section. Like this:

AuthorSurname, AuthorFirstname. Book Title (Kindle Locations 637-639).
Publishing House. Kindle Edition.

I want to get rid of these, and deleting them one at a time is getting laborious. I could remove them in seconds with a Find and Replace leaving the Replace box empty, if it weren't for the Location changing every time.

Is there a way to use wildcards in a Find and Replace in Mac OS apps?

So my Find string would look something like:

AuthorSurname, AuthorFirstname. Book Title (Kindle Locations ???-???).
Publishing House. Kindle Edition.

Best Answer

macOS's built-in text find and replace, NSTextFinder shown below, does support wildcards available from clicking the search button and choosing Insert Pattern (⌃⌥⌘P).

Other third-party search dialogs may support regex search. For example, in Scrivener, which is developed by the same company as Scapple, you can perform a regular expression search — [0-9]{3} matches a digit 0-9 exactly 3 times.

Solution 1: sed

Option -r of GNU sed is -E on the OS X/BSD sed (the one that comes with the OS, /usr/bin/sed). And to get rid of the encoding problem with 's, add export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8; export LANG=en_US.UTF-8; to the beginning of the do shell script command (see the question here):

set original_text to "string  string  string  $  text1
string  string  string  $  text2
text3
string  string  string  $  text4"

set commandString to "export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8; export LANG=en_US.UTF-8; " & ¬
    "echo " & quoted form of original_text & " | sed -E 's|^(.*)\\$ ?(.) (.*)$|$ \\3|g'" as string
set formattedCode to do shell script commandString

Returns:

$ text1
$ text2
text3
$ text4

screenshot of solution 1

Solution 2: AppleScript's text item delimiters

set original_text to "string  string  string  $  text1
string  string  string  $  text2
text3
string  string  string  $  text4"

set output to {}
set od to AppleScript's text item delimiters
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {"
"}
set all_lines to every text item of original_text
repeat with the_line in all_lines
    if "$" is not in the_line then
        set output to output & the_line
    else
        set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {"$"}
        set latter_part to last text item of the_line
        set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {" "}
        set last_word to last text item of latter_part
        set output to output & ("$ " & last_word as string)
    end if
end repeat
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {"
"}
set output to output as string
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to od
return output

Returns:

$ text1
$ text2
text3
$ text4

screenshot solution 2

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MacOS – Which OS X programs can rapidly find and replace text in very large files

MacOS – Applescript to replace string using sed

Solution 1: sed

Solution 2: AppleScript's text item delimiters

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