Application to find paragraph codes, etc and replace

TidBITS Talk
1

Hello, back in the dark ages, PAGES allowed us to find invisibles by searching for, example paragraphs using paragraph codes. I need to clean up text and found this application was easy. The newer versions of PAGES no longer had that feature. What can I use now?
Thank you
Tori

2

BBEdit (https://barebones.com) can do that. It’s paid but I believe that in free mode you can see invisibles and search for them.
Francisco

2 Likes
3

BBEdit can do it, easy. It’s my go-to text-processing workhorse. But it works only on plain text (or marked-up text, such as Markdown), so it’s not a good option for anything with styled text.

https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/

1 Like
4

You can still do that in current versions of Pages.

For example, to search for paragraph breaks:

  • View > Show Invisibles;
  • Select a paragraph marker
  • Edit > Find > Use Selection for Find

Now you can search for paragraph markers. If you open the Find dialog, you will see that a shortcut for the paragrph marker is “\n”, a code that will be familiar to Unix users.

14 Likes
5

Another option is to get DEVONtechnologies’ free “WordService” Services (plugin) and use the Reformat option, or any of the other many options it offers to clean up text

Caveat Emptor: Make sure to select only text to reformat. If there’s an image in the selection it will disappear.

6

BBEdit is my basic workhorse. I can open anything - even if oops! that’s a binary - I can paste whatever’s on my clipboard, and best of all I can paste almost any text and sort, filter, remove dups, run a reg-ex, change line-ending, split, … . So grateful it['s still around.

4 Likes
7

BBEdit indeed has many text editing functions and works with really large files (e.g. text file that is larger than 1GB):

bbedit

The Find (and Replace) interface allows for quick inspection of files, by using regex (e.g. [^[:alpha:][:digit:]]).

The Text Factory interface allows for operations to be sequenced one after another, and applied to text files, which is somewhat similar to pipe operations in Unix/R etc.

8

I’ve been happily using TextSoap for that and similar things for years.