Alchemy TECHBYTES

Find & Replace enhanced

Find & Replace is always a key feature of any software. One could say it is inevitable in a translation tool. And as part of increasing the usability of CATALYST 12, this feature has been dramatically enhanced. It now allows searching for text found in inline tags, keywords, context links... "My mind is blown!". You can search strings with a specific status, containing flags or locks. Furthermore, 2 Results windows are now available to list the output of your searches to, allowing to go back and forth to each results pane without overwriting one another.

Let us review the enhancements made and look closely at some of the options with some examples.

Find & Replace dialogs, left Catalyst 11 and right Catalyst 12

Search always starts with opting to find in either the Source or Target text, the Original and the Translated. But you'll be quick to point out to me that it is possible to deselect both options, unlike in Catalyst 11 and older! Well this is because you can now search in other fields of your Catalyst projects: Search in the IDs, in the Memos or in the Context Links (qualified as Other contents). A total of 5 fields to search against.

When searching in the Original or Translated fields, you also have new criteria to choose from. Those are used to pinpoint or narrow down your search spectrum. And apart from Raw text you can select more than one.

Text
Using the Text option you are searching within all the parsed segments in the project. This will not find any text on tags (i.e. tag names) but will find text in keywords. In other words, this Find and Replace as you have always known it until Catalyst 12.

Raw Text
Now this is a completely new concept. You'll use this option to search text in segments in their raw format, in their unformatted native syntax.

Instead of Text searching a string with tags such as:

Raw Text searches the string in its native format:

To clear the results of <span class="hcp5">Quickfind</span> click on the <img src="../image40.gif" style="width:16px; height:16px;" width=16 height=16 border="0" class="hcp6"> button.

A Raw Text search only looks into the "parsed" segment. Any tags or formatting that were not parsed as localisable are excluded.
Using Raw Text allows for example to search for any instance of a closing tag bracket followed by a space, which would not be possible in Text search.
Selecting Raw Text, the subsequent 3 options are automatically greyed out because they become irrelevant.

Inline Tag name, Inline Attribute name and Inline Attribute value empowers you to search within the tags themselves.

For example, the inline tag is <span class="hcp5"> in its raw format. With "span" the element name, "class" the attribute name and "hcp5" the attribute value.

Searching for "span" with Inline Tag name selected will find any string with the tag present. However, if you are looking for any tag which has a "class" attribute, then search "class" with the option Inline Attribute name. Finally, using the Inline Attribute value option, you may find any instance of a tag with an attribute value matching your searched text, such as "hcp5" in this example.

I won't go into the 4 Options which are not new in Catalyst 12 and are relatively self-explanatory.

I can image that with these improvements alone you can already appreciate the increased productivity of the Find & replace tool in Catalyst 12. But I am proud to say this isn't the whole of it!

Indeed, there are many times you will be interested to search in segments with a specific translation status or metadata. This is made possible with the Search by status tick boxes.

With them you can narrow down your search further specifying, for example, to only look in unlocked segments, or in For Review and Signed off segments only (thus translated by a User).

The result window

Of course you are accustomed to getting the Find and Replace hits in the Results Window. This is not changing. But sometimes didn't you find yourself wanting to compare the hits for different searches? Whether it be simply the number of hits found or the ability to look at 2 different results lists.

In order to achieve this, 2 major changes were implemented. The first is the addition of a second Find & Replace window, coupled with the option to output the Find results to one or the other.

You can toggle between the 2 windows using the button at the top of the pane.

For each search you perform, a line is written out to the Find and Replace window with the text searched within quotes and the number of hits in brackets.
This is very convenient if you do the same search several times after changing some parameters or changing translations. This "hits" count is a good indicator to analyse your changes. In fact, the same is applicable in the Validate Expert and this count becomes invaluable as you resolve validation errors.

A final change implemented to the Results window sees each previous search results, with the header highlighted in pale green, automatically collapsed to only display the hits for the last search. You can of course uncollapse any previous search results if needed.

What do you think? If you are already using Catalyst 12, what search criteria do you now use which you couldn't achieve before. Please email your examples to TechBytes@alchemysoftware.com and I'll share your experience with the rest of the community.