Re: Mass conversion of items

[<tomas@tuxteam.de>]

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On Tue, Sep 01, 2020 at 06:22:02PM +0100, Sharon Kimble wrote:
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> Thanks for replying Tomas.
>   <tomas@tuxteam.de> writes:

You're welcome :-)

[...]

> >> - --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> >> \uuline{foo}
> >> - --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

[...]

> >> - --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> >> /\uuline{foo}/
> >> - --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

[...]

> Okay, being very specific, all of '\uuline{foo}' remains, but with a
> forward slash at the beginning and end of '\uuline{foo}' to achieve this
> '/\uuline{foo}/'

Ah, got it now. Regular expressions seem to be your friends here.

I'm assuming your foo is a placeholder, and varies from instance
to instance. I'm further assuming the "foo"s don't contain a closing
curly brace (we'd have to refine things otherwise).

Try M-x (i.e. Meta-x) and then "query-replace-regexp". It asks you
first for the regular expression, which will be

  \\uuline{[^}]*}

(note the double backslash: that's because a backslash has a special
meaning in regular expressions, and you have to "escape" it with another
backslash; this regexp roughly states: "a backslash followed by uuline,
followed by an opening curly, followed by zero or more (that's the star)
characters which aren't a closing curly followed by a closing curly).

You finish that part with ENTER. Then you're asked for the replacement.
You enter

  /\&/

Which means: "a slash, followed by whatever you just matched (that's
the "\&" part, only one backslash this time) and a slash.

Make a backup of your file first :-)

Regular expressions are very powerful, but sometimes confusing. It pays
off big time to wrangle them!
 
Good luck
 - t

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