Searching for Acronyms

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The documents I edit include acronyms enclosed in parentheses. I normally have good enough luck searching for these acronyms by keying on the left parenthesis only. But some documents use lots of parentheses for mathematical formulas, which makes it tedious to search for acronyms in my usual way. Is there a way to search for a left parenthesis followed by two capital letters? I know how to specify an ALL CAPS search criteria while searching for Any Character, but it doesn’t seem to work for text that has not had the ALL CAPS attribute assigned to it.

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Is there a way to search for a left parenthesis followed by two capital letters? I know how to specify an ALL CAPS search criteria while searching for Any Character, but it doesn’t seem to work for text that has not had the ALL CAPS attribute assigned to it.

You could try a wildcard search. For this, you need to use the More button to expand the Find dialog, if it is not already expanded, check the “Use wildcards” box, and use a pattern similar to the following:

Code:

([A-Z]{2}*)

That specifies an opening parenthesis, two capital letters, then 0 or more of any characters, then a closing parenthesis. The backslashes are to indicate that the parentheses should be interpreted literally, rather than interpreted as a grouping.

Does that match what you need?

Unfortunately, when you next want to do a case-insensitive search, you will need to uncheck the “Use wildcards” box. If it gets to be too much of a headache, you could create a macro to do the search and clear the box for the next one.

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You could try a wildcard search. For this, you need to use the More button to expand the Find dialog, if it is not already expanded, check the “Use wildcards” box, and use a pattern similar to the following:

Code:

([A-Z]{2}*)

That specifies an opening parenthesis, two capital letters, then 0 or more of any characters, then a closing parenthesis. The backslashes are to indicate that the parentheses should be interpreted literally, rather than interpreted as a grouping.

Does that match what you need?

Unfortunately, when you next want to do a case-insensitive search, you will need to uncheck the “Use wildcards” box. If it gets to be too much of a headache, you could create a macro to do the search and clear the box for the next one.

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Yes, thanks Jefferson. That was exactly what I needed to search for the acronyms!

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