Bug in multi-file find & replace?

[Joe Wicentowski]

I'm observing some differences in the single- and multi- file find & replace. I'm trying to find instances of:

<note>...</note>
<note>...</note>

and collapse the notes together - thus:

<note>... ...</note>

To do so, I am searching for:

</note>\s*<note>

and replacing this string with a single space. This works fine in single-file find and replace, but not in multi-file find and replace. Any suggestions? I'm using oXygen 9.1 on WinXP.

Thanks!
Joe

[Radu]

Dear Joe,

Thank you for contacting us.
The Find Replace in Files dialog does not apply the regular expression on multiple lines so a regular expression which spans multiple lines like yours is not correctly found or replaced.
When performing find/replace in an opened editor multi-line regular expression matching is correctly supported.
I'll file an enhancement request to our internal bugs list so that multi-line regular expressions are supported also when find/replace in files is performed.

In the meantime you can also apply XSLT transforms to obtain similar results.
For a sample XML like:

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<root>

    <note>1</note>

    <note>2</note>

    <note>3</note>

    <note>4</note>

</root>

applying the XSL:

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

    <xsl:output method="xml"/>

    <xsl:template match="root">

        <root>

            <xsl:if test="count(note) > 0">

                <note>

                    <xsl:for-each select="note">

                        <xsl:value-of select="text()"/>

                    </xsl:for-each>

                </note>

            </xsl:if>

        </root>

    </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

would merge all note tags into one.

Regards,
Radu