Just a curious question... About 3 little boxes

[K.Logan]

I hope this is the right category, if not I am so sorry!

so I just realized when I clicked control F i saw these 3 little boxes on the upper right of the search bar and I was wonder what you can use them for.

If my explaining sucks I am so sorry here is a picture if it helps LOL

[dishsoap]

You can search for a certain word and then replace all of them with a different one I think

[K.Logan]

wait what… I am sorry I dont understand LOL

[dishsoap]

so, say you had written “information” 8 times in your script, and wanted to change all to “knowledge,” you could search for “information” in the top box, click on all, and then type “knowledge” into the bottom box and click on all. This would replace all “information” with the word “knowledge”

[K.Logan]

oh yeah I know how to use that I just want to know that the 3 little boxes in the upper right corner do

[dishsoap]

oh LOL my b, yea i have no clue i didn’t even see those 😮‍💨

[K.Logan]

LOL no your fine ~ !!!
yeah I legit just saw them when I was using it and I was like is this new?

[fake_bananas]

I think the Aa one lets you decide if you want the replaceable word to be case sensitive or not, but I have no idea about the other two!

[K.Logan]

ohh that would make sence I would have to try it out~!

[Beaver]

The “Whole Word Search”, or the /b button, highlights the word you’ve typed in as a singular. For example, take the words FEMALE and MALE. If you typed “male” in the “find and replace” box without selecting the /b button, it would highlight the word MALE, but it would also highlight MALE that’s in FEMALE. But if you repeated the process and selected the /b button, then only the word MALE would be highlighted, ignoring the MALE in FEMALE.

Without using WWS

Using WWS

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The “Case Sensitive Search”, or the Aa button, is just that. Case Sensitive. It depends on how you’ve written the word. Is it all lower cases? Uppercases? In the example below, I typed in “caps lock” as all lower cases. Without CSS, both the capitalised and lower-cased words were highlighted. But with CSS only the lower-cased words were highlighted.

Without using CSS

Using CSS

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The “RegExp Search”, or .* button is a bit unclear to me. There’s not much I know about regular expressions, but it’s about using special characters (such as ., *, ^, $, and more) to search for specific words. To quote Wikipedia, “a regular expression is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern”. In my example, I’ll be using the wildcard expression, which is a point (or a series of points) that acts as a placeholder for other letters. If you were to type the letters “om”, only those two letters will be highlighted. But if you typed “. .om” (without the space in-between the points) and select the “RegExp Search” button, the two points would be placeholders for two other letters which would then return words like zoom, prom, room, etc. But it’ll only highlight four letters (so for freedom, only “edom” will be highlighted).

Using regex

I personally haven’t gone through all the regex symbols so I don’t know if all of them work in the Writer’s Portal.

Here's a little more about special characters in regex

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These are all from personal experiences, so I’m not 100% sure if I’m accurate here.

[K.Logan]

OHHHHHH
that would have been so useful if I new them sooner!!!
Thank you!