Wildcards are still my friends...

Thu, 02 Nov 2017 13:50:07 GMT

Further to a post of mine from August 2012...

Let's say you have an abbreviation (could be a TLA or it could be something else). There is no apparent expansion of the abbreviation in the document. That said, there's nothing to prevent said expansion from appearing somewhere in the text.

For each letter of the abbreviation, use the following template in Word (with wildcards enabled):

<[xX][а-я]*>

where "< denotes "start of word," "xX" denotes a starting letter, for example, "аА" (both letters so as to catch words that start with either lower- or upper-case letters—this is an improvement over the technique from 2012), the "*" at the end denotes "zero or more of the previous character" (another improvement, which will catch single-letter words, though admittedly their appearance in abbreviations is rare), and ">" denotes "end of word."

So, for example, if you are looking to see if the abbreviation ПКЛ appears, you'd search for:

<[<пП>][а-я]*> <[<кК>][а-я]*> <[<лЛ][а-я]*>

As it turns out, ПКЛ appears in a document I am working on (more precisely, in the title of the Russian source file). Using this method, I've determined no three consecutive words start with these three respective letters.

Back to the face!

Cheers...

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AlexPGP's Corner

Wildcards are still my friends...