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• • June 28, 2019 at 8:23 am #117366
    Joseph Lops

    Member

    I have the following string of text in a paragraph:

    . . . and Written Grammar defines as “words or phrases like ‘anyway,” ‘right,” ‘okay,” ‘as I say,” ‘to begin with.” We use them to connect, organise and manage what we say or write . . .

    elsewhere in the document there are combinations of 4, 5, 6, etc words

    and I want to change the open single quotes to open double quotes, but I can’t seem to figure out how to find all groups of word counts.

    (‘)(.+)(\p{punctuation})(”) will find ‘anyway,” and all text to the end of the paragraph
    (‘)(\w+)(\p{punctuation})(”) will find ‘anyway,” / ‘right,” / ‘okay,” but not ‘as I say,”

    I have tried everything I can’t think of and nothing is working for me. Of course I can write and endless string of word numbers using | but I am sure there is an easier way.

    help please.

    thanks

  • June 28, 2019 at 8:47 am #117367
    Aaron Troia

    Participant

    Hey Joseph try this,

    (‘)([^”]+)(”)

    Using [^”]+ will tell the search to find everything up, to but not, closing double quotes and will make make the search less greedy than .+ but more greedy than \w+ but wont go past the first instance of the double quotes.

    Aaron

  • June 28, 2019 at 8:50 am #117368
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    What if you just searched for '\w which means a single quote followed by any word character.
    Then replace it with a ”
    See also:
    https://creativepro.com/tip-of-the-week-exchanging-apostrophes.php
    and:

    GREP to replace straight double quotation marks

  • June 28, 2019 at 9:05 am #117369
    Joseph Lops

    Member

    works great.
    thanks!

  • June 28, 2019 at 9:22 am #117370
    Joseph Lops

    Member

    thanks David, but there are single quotes that need to stay single.

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