Find replace in cross-references (in bulk)

Question

Similarly to Iver, I have never used RegEx. I have a team who has changed their cross-reference format to use . between chapter and verse instead of :

Could someone walk me through how to help them change all the references in bulk. I tried to follow the previous answers, but got no results at all.

Are there any courses, EMDC online sessions on RegEx?

Thanks,
anon928451

Answer 1

anon928451:

Are there any courses, EMDC online sessions on RegEx?

I don’t know if you learn best this way, but I learned most of my Regex by playing around with Regex101 - which allows you to try out your expressions before actually using them in an application. It contains a nice quick-reference guide on the right which has a section called Common Tokens which will get you making 90% of the expressions you’d ever need.

Note that the 3-colon syntax (:::) is specific to RegexPal and I doubt you’d find any other application that works that way.

Answer 2

A search via RegexPal could look like this:

Search: \\x .*?\\x\*:::( \d+):(\d)
Replace: \1.\2

Where \\x .*?\\x\* means: search only inside of cross references
The three colons ::: separate between the context search expression and the actual search
Actual search expression: ( \d+):(\d) One or more digits, followed by a colon and then another digit
Replace: Put together the content of the first expression in parens, a literal dot and the content of the second pair of parens

(I don’t know of any regex online sessions.)

Comments

HI anon719148,

I can’t say I fully understand it all, but it does seem to work. I’m looking forward to learning more at some point.

Thank you so much!

anon928451