can't find literal text *anything*

[bkain1]

Hi, I'm new to textPad, I'll admit, but I searched on this and can't find anything (I must be using the wrong words). this is textpad 5.4.2 on win 7. I'm trying to take a large mainframe flat file and replace any spaces with tabs. I checked the preferences->editor for "use Posix regular expressions" and tried to do a "find \x20" or "find [: :]" or "find [ ]". no matter what I tried, I got "cannot find literal expression". I think I solved the problem by putting the search into hex mode and finding 20 and replacing with 09 but I'd like to figure out what I'm doing wrong on the literals. Can someone advise?
thanks in advance

[ak47wong]

"find \x20" and "find [ ]" will both work, but you have to select the Regular expression check box. It doesn't have to be that complicated though; just search for a space:

Find what: (type a space)
Replace with: \t

Select Regular expression and click Replace All.

[bkain1]

thank you!