Search and Replace Issue With Finding "!"

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

Hi,

My last editor went in and put back “!” points where I had removed. I thought it would be easy to just do a search/find and replace.

But it doesn’t find one “!” where there are at least 10. I try searching forward and backward. Special way to handle this?

Thanks.
Patrice

2

That should be working fine. I just ran a quick test and was able to convert a bunch of question marks to exclamation points, then those to commas. Which search are you using (for example, regular old Cmd-F document search?), and what options do you have set with the tool?

3

Sorry for the late reply. This went into my spam folder.

I am using the FIND and REPLACE. It does not find one “!.” I had to literally go though manually to look for them. Tried 5=6 times; even adding an ! to the current page. Yet that find couldn’t even find that one.

Patrice

4

Can you find other things that are in front of you in the text? Can you find exclamation points in other projects (maybe even just make a test blank project and type in a little text with an exclamation point).

5

I did a “find” for other common words and “,” and Scrivener found okay.

However, I then used the Global Search and was able to locate the “!.” But The find feature could not locate.

Strange.

Thanks for your suggestions.

6

Yes, this is a pretty strange problem.

Try this: open TextEdit (the basic free text editor that comes with your Mac—which incidentally uses the same text engine that Scrivener does, so it is great for testing) and copy and paste a page or so of text into that. Now see if you can use Find and Replace in TextEdit or if it fails there as well. I’m wondering if maybe there is something odd that was inserted into your text when your editor worked with the file (were they using Word or something?). I’m not too hopeful of this being the cause though, since you mentioned typing in your own “!” by itself and still have troubles finding it, it’s worth a quick check though.

If find and replace works in TextEdit, then we could try resetting the project’s window settings. I’ve seen other strange find & replace bugs cleared out by doing so. This won’t touch any data to be clear, just reset the window size, splits, corkboard and outliner settings and so forth. Optionally you can save these settings:

  1. Use the Window/Layouts/Manage Layouts….
  2. In that panel, click the + button.
  3. Check off the two options in the right-hand side and close the panel.

All right, now to reset the project’s interface settings:

  1. Click once on the File menu.
  2. Hold down the Option key to reveal hidden menu commands.
  3. With Option held down, click on “Close Project and Clear Interface Settings”.

Now you can reload the project (it should be in Recent Projects). Like I say it’s going to be fully reset so it will look a bit vanilla but don’t be alarmed. You can expand the Binder out, find your stuff again, and use the Layouts panel to reload your project settings.

7

I will bookmark these instructions. Thank you. No need to do now as the global search found the “!.” But when I need a search again and run into issues, I’ll give these steps a try.

Thank you for the detailed instructions.
Patrice

8

Very interesting, glad you found a solution!