How to ignore certain characters in searches

Amanda Hamilton

Hello! I have a large collection of audio transcriptions done via the CLAN program. I have searched these transcriptions via Notepad++ for years. I’m suddenly having a problem searching across line breaks, though. It seems that CLAN adds a carriage return and a line feed whenever it wraps a line of text, and then a tab at the beginning of the next line (see screenshot below). This means that when I search for a string of words, Notepad++will find them if they’re not broken across a line, but it won’t find them if they are. I definitely did not have this problem in the past; I don’t know if something about CLAN has changed or what. Is there a way to search for a string of words (typed out normally, with one space between each word) and have it still find strings that are broken across lines like this, with a carriage return, line feed, and tab potentially replacing any one of the inter-word spaces?

Thank you!!

Screenshot 2024-03-29 011232.png

Notepad++ v8.6.4 (64-bit)
Build time : Feb 20 2024 - 00:12:59
Path : C:\Program Files\Notepad++\notepad++.exe
Command Line :
Admin mode : OFF
Local Conf mode : OFF
Cloud Config : OFF
OS Name : Windows 11 Home (64-bit)
OS Version : 23H2
OS Build : 22631.3296
Current ANSI codepage : 1252
Plugins :
mimeTools (3.1)
NppConverter (4.6)
NppExport (0.4)

PeterJones

@Amanda-Hamilton ,

I definitely did not have this problem in the past; I don’t know if something about CLAN has changed or what.

I presume CLAN changed (maybe it used to generate long lines, and you just saw Notepad++'s long-line wrapping, which doesn’t introduce CRLF)

If you use Regular Expression (“regex”) search syntax, as defined in the Online User Manual, you could do this.

Searching for best I could, it would fail, but searching in regex mode for best\s+I\s+could, it would find it (\s+ means “one or more whitespace characters”, where “whitespace characters” include space, tab, newline, and some other Unicode characters as well)

-—

Useful References

Amanda Hamilton

@PeterJones ,

Thank you very much! That does indeed work. I have also heard back from the CLAN developer, who suggests I could use a CLAN program to generate long tiers–but it does make things very hard to read in CLAN. Your solution is probably better. Thank you!!