Is it possible to replace a series of text in a document?

Question

I am dealing with a series of lines that have a varying amount of periods, such as follows:

Topic Planner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .353A
Math Background for Teachers . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353E
Universal Access . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .353G

Is there a way to replace the periods with a tab? All I can think of is Find & Replace ". " with a space, then Find & Replace " " with a tab, but that just creates a bunch of tabs, and I only need one.

Is there a way to do this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Keep replacing 2 periods with 1 period until only 1 remains in each line. Then change to tab. You can speed it up a little by first changing 5 periods to 1 then 4 periods to 1 etc.

There is also a thing called "regular expressions" that can be used but it is a little complicated to explain here.

Answer 2

Find and replace '........' (8 dots) with a tab.
Then find and replace the remaining individual dots with nothing.
This will only work for you if you have a fixed and not a proportional font.

Because the words on the left have a variation in size of more than one tab of space, you will need multiple tabs for some of the shorter entries to have the second column line up.

IF - You really only want one tab character between the two, do the above and then replace all 2 tab characters with one tab character. Do it twice.

Answer 3

you need an editor that provides Regular Expression support in the find and replace tool.

BBEdit, Dreamweaver, and Homesite all do.


then you can find 2 or more dots for example like this
\.{2,}