Find will not find HTML Characters

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hatchmo
Posts: 99
Joined: 2004-03-01 10:35:56
Location: Cotati, CA

Find will not find HTML Characters

Post by hatchmo »

When you copy a list from a Web page, how does NWP convert the content?

For example, the underlying HTML is:

Code: Select all

<ul>
	<li>Item 1</li>
	<li>Item 2</li>
</ul>
When you paste this into a Nisus document, you get

?[gray rect]Item 1
?[gray rect]Item 2

You cannot perform a Find and Replace of these leading garbage sequences, because you cannot copy ?[gray rect] and paste it into the Find box. The clipboard is oblivious to it.
Before I devise a way to Find these things, I need to know how Nisus creates them, and what they are.

([gray rect] is literally a couple of characters highlighted in gray so that they appear as a gray rectangle. You can't copy 'em; you can't paste 'em.)
Al Hatch
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greenmorpher
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Location: Melbourne, Australia
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Post by greenmorpher »

Hello hatchmo

Change the file's suffix to ".txt" and all will be found. Same applies in TextEdit. Alternatively, look at PageSpinner -- a dedicated HTML text editor.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- Revealed! The secrets of how you can use type and layout to turbocharge your messages in print. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com
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martin
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Re: Find will not find HTML Characters

Post by martin »

hatchmo wrote:When you copy a list from a Web page, how does NWP convert the content?
...
When you paste this into a Nisus document, you get

?[gray rect]Item 1
?[gray rect]Item 2
When you paste content into NWP it looks on the clipboard for the best data that was provided by the source application. In this case Safari provides RTF data, which is good, since it is our native format. Unfortunately there is a bug in Safari that prevents it from properly encoding its list styles. That is why you see question marks.

You can fix the pasted content in NWP by using the Lists palette. The quickest way to do so is to change the list type from bulleted to numbered and back to bulleted again (click the "•" tab, then the "1" tab, and finally the "•" tab again).
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