Searching for foreign characters

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ndcahill
Posts: 18
Joined: 2003-04-26 05:51:07

Searching for foreign characters

Post by ndcahill »

Is there an easy way to search for classes of Unicode characters? I'm typing and proofreading ancient Greek, and have text entered by people who don't know Greek, and so they have used mathematical symbols, characters from Symbol font, and characters from the regular alphabet that look like Greek but aren't. Is it possible to search for all legitimate Greek characters in the way one can search for standard alphabetical characters with a grep search [a-zA-Z]? [?-??-?] doesn't work, naturally. Are all the unicode characters in order so that one could search by some symbol number? Likewise, can one search for mathematical symbols, and characters in the symbol section of Unicode?

Many thanks,

Nick Cahill
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martin
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Post by martin »

You can indeed search for Greek characters. You should be able to do so using the PowerFind Pro expression:

[\u0370-\u03FF\u1F00-\u1FFF]+

This will find "proper" Greek characters. That is, bits of text whose underlying characters are actually Greek Unicode code points, as opposed to non-Greek code points with a special font applied (eg: Symbol).
ndcahill
Posts: 18
Joined: 2003-04-26 05:51:07

Searching for foreign characters

Post by ndcahill »

Thank you, Martin - that is exactly what I wanted, and another example of why I love Nisus. Instantly I can find all those sneaky letters that look like Greek but are actually Latin or math or something... what other word processor can do that?
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