Tjyylli

I'm trying to do this DAISY talking book thing, and instead of using Dolphin Publisher's HTML thingie (which is hideous), I thought I'd play with doing it without the GUI, in notepad++, since I know basic HTML.

So I need to surround each sentence with

<span class="sentence" id="aiw_0002"> text of sentence </span>

And of course that ID number needs to increment. Is there a magic way I can make a keystroke/macro that would do that? Basically paste </span><span class="sentence" id="something_xxxx"> where X goes up 1 each time?

My non-fancy way of doing it to copy the span statement (stopping before final-quote-mark-and-greater-than-sign), into Excel2016, doing a second one (0003) to establish the pattern, and do the click-drag thing to autopopulate. I just have to add in the last tip of the tag (if I don't end with a numeral, there's no auto-increment thingie).

I can't install anything - government computer, things are pretty locked. And no one else in my area uses Dolphin or knows web stuff at all.

Based on this Stack Overflow answer:

• Hold the Alt key and use your mouse to select the column of numbers that you wish to change.




• Choose Edit → Column Editor... ( Alt+C ).




• Select the Number to Insert radio button option and fill in the Initial number: and Increase by: values.




• Click OK to apply your changes.

Caveats

The basic drawback for your use case (besides manual selection) is that there are no leading zeros added automatically. This can be overcome with one or more regex replacements, but isn't ideal. For example, to add three leading zeros to your given line(s) (after alterations):

• Select your lines (e.g. those with 0-9).




• Search → Replace... ( Ctrl+H ).




• ex. Find what: (.*)aiw_(.*) → Replace with: $1aiw_000$2.




• Mark the In Selection checkbox.




• Make sure the Search Mode → Regular expression... radio button option is selected (I also had the Wrap around checkbox selected, but this may or may not need to be toggled).




• Replace All

In the regular expression above, the first (.*) and second (.*) correspond to the groups $1 and $2, respectively.

Note that the regular expression above is just an example. You may need to alter it in order to obtain desired/consistent behavior based on your HTML code.

Is there a magic way I can make a keystroke/macro that would do that?

Notepad++ has the ability to record macros, yes. That said, it might be difficult to come up with one that would fit all of the steps above into one go (though you certainly could have several for various stages of the process).