Changing Footnote scripture reference format

Question

One of the projects I support has the following formatting for their chapter/verse references in footnotes (the part after the \fr and before the \ft tag) 31.5 rather than 31:5 which is what they want. I had them check their scripture reference settings and they specify a :.

Does anyone know how to get PT to convert the Footnote chapter/verse references to the desired format or does the team need to do that manually?

Thanks!

Answer 1

It might be worth pointing out here that Paratext uses the current chapter/verse separator from the Reference Settings each time it inserts a footnote, but if the separator changes, existing footnotes are not affected. So at one point the chapter/verse separator must have been set to a full stop (period). Changing it to colon will result in all new footnotes using colon, but you will still need a regex to fix existing footnotes.

Answer 2

It is fairly straightforward to do using RegexPal. I think Randy Hasty actually set up a batch of preconfigured regexes including one that that covers standardizing the footnote reference format. If you are familiar with RegexPal, I can try to send you a search and replace string that would fix the reference format, or you might be able to get the more complete preconfigured user menu that Randy already set up.

Answer 3

Thanks! I figured that a regex could be a solution, but I wasn’t sure how exactly to use it.

Thanks for the input. I think we’ll be able to solve the problem from here.

Comments

anon469793,
To find the period in the middle of a reference and change it to a colon I use the following in the Paratext Find/Replace.
Find:
regex:(?<=\d).(?=\d)
Replace:
:
This says, “use regex” to look for a period that is proceeded by a digit and followed by a digit and replace it with a colon.

Obviously if you have other places in the text where you have digit period digit and want to keep them you would need to expand the find. You might want to do a find first and examine the results to see if there are any items that need to be maintained (like $200.00)

---

To just get the \fr field you could expand the find to be:
Find:
regex:(?<=\fr \d+).(?=\d)
Replace:
: