Search by column

gcotterl · Post by **gcotterl** » Sun Oct 23, 2016 7:04 pm

Textpad appears to search by row (i.e., horizontally).
Is there any way to search by column (i.e., vertically)?

ben_josephs · Post by **ben_josephs** » Mon Oct 24, 2016 7:55 am

Do you mean you want it to find the matches of your search expression in a different order, so that, for example, it finds matches for the regex \d in numerical order in the text

Code: Select all

xxx 1 xxx 5 xxx
xxx 2 xxx 6 xxx
xxx 3 xxx 7 xxx
xxx 4 xxx 8 xxx

?

No, it can't do that.

gcotterl · Post by **gcotterl** » Tue Oct 25, 2016 6:16 pm

No.

I want Search to look for the expression from left-to-right (i.e., in position 1, 2, 3, etc.) not row-by-row)

ben_josephs · Post by **ben_josephs** » Tue Oct 25, 2016 8:31 pm

I don't know what you mean.

Please give an example and describe how what you want TextPad to do differs from what it does do.

gcotterl · Post by **gcotterl** » Sat Oct 29, 2016 7:04 pm

Here's the data:

2009:09:30 19:44:44 2016:04:23 06:49:53
2016:04:23 06:49:53 2016:04:23 06:49:53

I want Search to find '2016:04:23 06:49:53' starting in position 1 (in row 2) before it finds that expression starting in position 21 (in row 1)

ben_josephs · Post by **ben_josephs** » Sat Oct 29, 2016 7:19 pm

Is that not what I described in my first comment above?

gcotterl · Post by **gcotterl** » Sun Oct 30, 2016 4:18 pm

So TEXTPAD can't do what I want?

ben_josephs · Post by **ben_josephs** » Mon Oct 31, 2016 3:09 pm

If that's what you meant then no, it can't.

You can, of course, use regular expressions to search for text only within some number of characters from the beginning of a line, but that's not what you asked for.

Post by **AmigoJack** » Mon Oct 31, 2016 7:57 pm

You could use block mode (Configure > Block Select Mode), then select your "column" and search on selection only. (Edit: no, you can't)

After all, text files never have columns - thus don't expect a text editor to know your definition of where a column ends and the next begins.

ben_josephs · Post by **ben_josephs** » Mon Oct 31, 2016 8:17 pm

You can't restrict a search to a selection. You can only restrict a replacement to a selection.

Besides, gcotterl didn't ask to restrict a search. He asked to change the order in which matches are found.

Post by **AmigoJack** » Mon Oct 31, 2016 10:29 pm

My bad: you really can't search on selection. After all those years I always thought it was there as option, yet I never needed it. (But it wouldn't be senseless either.)

I can't even start to think about treating text as columns: the search goes thru text in a stream. Seeking column-wise (we still don't know by what columns are separated... tabs? spaces?) would mean to let the search make multiple jumps in the text stream. Which is technically possible, but questionably worth the cost of work it needs.