(I am certain that this question has already been asked, but I cannot find it.)
I need to replace anything between single quotes with \enquote{}, the capture to be put inside the curly brackets. With double quotes I can get away with:
- FIND:
"(.*?)" - REPLACE:
\\enquote{$1}
But with single quotes there is the obvious problem of apostrophes. Is there way to solve that problem.
Example:
He said, 'it's always sunny here.' 2 Answers
One multi-step approach:
- Use Search and Replace, "replace all" to replace
space+'with
something appropriate (e.g. space+") - repeat .1 for
'+space. - you might also have
'.to handle...
(i.e.'at the end of a sentence, and also at the end of a line -
and how about at the very beginning of a line?) - Now use Search and Replace to replace
'into"for
the remaining instances and select to replace or not, manually (Yes/No).
To get this to work with an automated process?
That is a bit harder to say the least, I'm all ears regarding that...
If you can find a way to express the Search-items above with regex'es (i.e. $ man re_format) then you might be at least part of the way to automation.
This might be of some help there though, but I take it that \b isn't available in all regex-implementations.
As you didn't give the language/tool you are using, I give a solution that uses Notepad++.
- Ctrl+H
- Find what:
\w'\w(*SKIP)(*FAIL)|'(.+?)'(?!\w) - Replace with:
\\enquote{$1} - CHECK Wrap around
- CHECK Regular expression
- CHECK
. matches newline* - Replace all
Explanation:
\w # 1 word character ' # single quote (in fact an apostrophe) \w # 1 word character (*SKIP) # skip this match (*FAIL) # abort this match (don't considere the apostrophe) | # OR ' # single quote (.+?) # group 1, 1 or more any character, not greedy ' # single quote (?!\w) # only if not followed by a word character Screen capture (before):
Screen capture (after):
