Invisible characters in search replace list table

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dfhtextpipe
Posts: 986
Joined: Sun Dec 09, 2007 2:49 am
Location: UK

Invisible characters in search replace list table

Post by dfhtextpipe »

It's quite possible to paste control characters such as tab directly into the replace list table.

They can appear invisible to the user, making it almost impossible to debug.
The invisibility is because the pasted tab becomes a zero width character.
Human readable copy reveals it as "\t", but the GUI doesn't show it as that.

Code: Select all

Perl pattern [abc] with [\tdef]
   [ ] Match case
   [ ] Whole words only
   [ ] Case sensitive replace
   [ ] Prompt on replace
   [ ] Skip prompt if identical
   [ ] First only
   [ ] Extract matches
   Maximum text buffer size 4096
   [ ] Maximum match (greedy)
   [ ] Allow comments
   [X] '.' matches newline
   [ ] UTF-8 Support

   [ ] Process longest strings first
   [ ] Simultaneous search
This caught me out earlier today.

Can you do something to prevent this?
Can you ensure that tabs other than the delimiter between search & replace columns get automatically converted to \t and displayed as such?

Best regards,

David
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Invisible tabs.zip
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David
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Re: Invisible characters in search replace list table

Post by DataMystic Support »

Sure. That sounds like a useful change. Other fields do modify the text on paste, but I'm not sure what code is against the search/replace filter.
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