Re: Automating an atypical search & replace

On 07/14/2024 01:08 AM, Stan Brown wrote:

On Sat, 13 Jul 2024 11:08:48 -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:

>
I'm reformatting some HTML files containing chapters of the KJV Bible.
My source follows the practice of italicizing some words.
I find italics distracting.
>
These occurrences are consistently of the form
     <span class='add'>arbitrary_text</span>
>
I wish to delete "<span class='add'>" and *ASSOCIATED* "</span>".
Obviously it would not be wise to fully automate the action.
I wish to find all occurrences of <span
class='add'>arbitrary_text</span> an manually confirm the edit.
>
In general, is it feasible?

 Yes, of course. Any editor above the level of Notepad ought to be
able to do this. (Sadly, a lot of editors are not above the level of
Notepad.)
 For instance, in Vim you would use this command after opening the
file:
 :%s;<span class='add'>\([^<]*\)</span>;\1;gc
 % = process every line of the file
\( ... \) makes that part of the pattern match addressable
[^>]* matches a string of characters not including a <. If there is
other HTML between span and /span, it will not match.
\1 = the text found between span and /span
gc = do every occurrence on each line, but confirm each one

I'll use parsing that expression as a guide to understanding
https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/kate/katepart/regular-expressions.html .

 

Can KDE's Kate do it?

 I've no idea.

I'm gaining an appreciation of just how much HTML Kate can handle.
Its highlighting feature begins to serve for minimal syntax checking.

 But there's an easier solution. Change the definition of class add in
your style sheet:
 span.add { font-style:normal; }
 Then you won't have to edit the HTML at all.
>

Learning CSS is beyond my current goals.