advanced find and replace pages 5

GT,

Hardly anything is "advanced" in Pages 5. Some F&R options have been tucked away in the little gear icon, upper left. As for the former ability to pick from a list of control characters, you'll have to find examples in your text and Copy/Paste to the fields in F&R.

Jerry

I wonder if you could be more specific describing the method you discovered. I would like to be able to find a text string and replace it with something else. The original text string repeates throughout the document and has special characters. Would you method work for this???

If you read the help, Help in the menu > click on it, you'll find this:

Find and replace text

You can search for specific words, phrases, numbers and characters, and automatically replace search results with new content that you specify. All visible content in the document — the main body text, headers and footers, tables, text boxes, shapes, footnotes and endnotes, and comments — is included in the search.

Search for specific text

1. Click View in the toolbar, then choose Show Find & Replace.
2. In the search field, enter the word or phrase you want to find.Matches are highlighted as you enter text.
3. To find words that match the capitalisation you specify, or to restrict search results to the whole words you entered, click , then choose Whole Words or Match Case (you can choose both).
4. Click the arrow buttons to find the next or previous match.

To see or clear recent searches, click the arrow next to the magnifying glass.

Replace found text

1. Click View in the toolbar, then choose Show Find & Replace.
2. Click in the Find & Replace window, then choose Find & Replace.You can also select other options, such as Whole Words and Match Case, to refine your search.
3. Enter a word or phrase in the first field.As you enter text, matches are highlighted. The first match is selected and highlighted in yellow.
4. Enter the replacement word or phrase in the second field.If you leave the Replace field blank, all instances of the text are deleted when you replace the found text.
5. Use the buttons at the bottom of the Find panel to review and change the text matches:
   • Replace All: Replaces all text matches with the replacement text.
   • Replace & Find: Replaces the selected match and moves to the next.
   • Replace: Replaces the selected match with the replacement text but doesn’t move to the next match.
   • Previous and Next arrows: Move to the previous or next match without making a change.

Type option-tab or option-return in the "search" field.

What G Tack means is that you select the text/string in your document first (to select formatting characters, such tab or return, it is helpful to select show invisibles in the View menu) After you have selected your string, and while the small, grossly simplified Find/Replace window is open, you hit Command-E, then the F/R window will recognize your string. You can also select this option in Edit>Find>Use selection for Find. It is unfortunate that this is not any clearer, but this works fine. Use the Option+Tab works for tabs, but Option+Return does not work when entering it into the Find box.

Pages v5 is not based on Pages '09 v4.3, and consequently, many of the older applications features were omitted. Among these was the more capable Find and Replace. Pages 5 Find and Replace is discussed here, and here.

Well done! The copy-paste into the Find field doesn't work, but it's possible to Edit---Find---Use-Selection-for-Find (shortcut: cmd-E) to get something (a carriage return, for example) into the Find field.