those frelling hyphenations are driving this archivist bonkers

What app is it you're using to search, and can it use regexes?

Because I have a regex for multiple-hyphenated phrases right here, AIFG!

Or, of course, he said coming back from the coffee machine, a regex for "any phrase over 50 chars not containing whitespace gets a linebreak at char 51" would be easy.

I was hoping you'd say something like that.

Right now I'm just doing it in a browser window. I set my preferences to download, say, a thousand posts at a time, then if my horizontal scroll bar appears, I search through that batch of posts in smaller chunks until I find the offending hyphenations. What I need to know is not only what long hyphenations there are, but also what post they're in so I can edit them.

Or, of course, he said coming back from the coffee machine, a regex for "any phrase over 50 chars not containing whitespace gets a linebreak at char 51" would be easy.

Yeah, it's not always hyphenations, sometimes youjustgetwordsstrungtogetheryouknow?

I have Perl, not sure what other programs I have that would be suitable.

edit: And editing by hand is fine, because there aren't that many instances (15-20), and that way you can place the break where it makes sense.

I have Perl, not sure what other programs I have that would be suitable.

Obviously Perl would do it, but Homesite and Dreamweaver have regex support. Then there are things like Ultra-edit and whatever.

With Perl you can do it with a quick oneliner, using the -i flag.

Let me play just a little...

I have Homesite 4.5.

I'll trying and find my copy of homesite and see what the syntax is.

But, here's something you could try. From the commandline, doing this:

perl -p -i.bak -e 's/(\\S{50})/$1n/' longstrings.txt

will put a linebreak after the fiftieth character of any line of longstrings.txt which contains fifty non-whitespace characters without a break.

Of course it won't wrap it neatly at the nearest hyphen, and it doesn't fix lines with more than 100 chars in a row, (run it twice!) but it's better than nothing.

Oh and it makes a backup file of course, called longstrings.txt.bak -- Perl, is there anything it can't do?

The code for "a pattern of fifty non-spaces in a row" in Homesite is the very beautiful:

([^[:space:]]{50})

so if you choose "extended Replace", check the Regular Expressions box then replace the above code with

\\1

followed by a return, that will hard-wrap, in a rather brutal way, all 50-character strings, putting a line break after char 50.

I'll give it a try.

Hi, there's a wonderful new article by Gothic Miss Manners (posted in Press today) about etiquette on boards, and newbies and old-bies, and I thought it might make a good addition or link to the Buffista main FAQ. FYI.