TuneTracker™ QuickTip

Doing Block Search-and-Replace in Pe

Since TuneTracker format clocks and master logs are in the nicely-standardized simple text format used by computers worldwide, you can edit them on just about any computer, using the word processor or text editor of your choice. If you're editing them in Haiku®, both StyledEdit and Pe work well, and are both distributed with TuneTracker System installations. Our favorite of the two is Pe, in part, because it allows you to do very cool things with search-and-replace.

While both programs can do search-and-replace of a single, short line of text, Pe lets you do so using any amount of text, even a whole block of it containing multiple lines. This comes in very handy. Why? Because sometimes the change you want to make is to a sequence of lines, not to just a single line. Here's an example.

Random Genre Jazz
Rotate Comment Jingle

Suppose you want to change the word "Jazz" to "BeBop" in the first line, but you only want to make that change if the next line in your log is a jingle. Obviously, you don't want to just search for the word "Jazz" and replace it with the word "Bebop." That'd affect it everywhere, not just where you want it to happen. So instead, you must search for every instance of the two lines together, and replace them with an alternate version of those two lines.

To accomplish a block search-and-replace in Pe, first drag across the text you wish to find and replace, and do CTRL-C. Now choose the Edit pulldown menu and select "Find" (or just do CTRL-F), and paste in the two lines above in the first textbox. Then paste it againto the lower textbox, and make the necessary change of the word Jazz to the word BeBop. Then, you select "Wrap-around Search" and click Replace, and the two lines will be replaced everywhere that they occur together. Become familiar with the Replace feature! It can be an enormous time-saver.

Extra Hint: Pe's Find window can be enlarged by dragging its lower right corner, giving you a larger visible area for big blocks of text.



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