I have a novel I’m working on and I want to strip out all the text except the dialogue in the speech marks. Is this possible using the Alt Searching Add-on. And if so, HOW?
In advance
That depends on the use of the quotation marks. If you have quoted text in “double quotes”, note the inverted commas, it’s easy with the normal Find & Replace (Ctrl+H):
Type “[^”]+” in the Find box, open Other options, tick Regular expressions, click Find all. Close the dialog box, copy to clipboard, start blank document, paste, and you have everything you want.
This expression seems to work across paragraph borders, as long as quotations are in one paragraph. Quotations crossing paragraph borders aren’t found by this.
If you use plain double quotes, use the expression "[^"]+" instead. If the quotes are in single quotes (same as apostrophes), you’re probably out of luck, because any apostrophes will break the order of open and close quotation marks, unless you use another character for the apostrophe.
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Thanks very much. It worked. I did use single quotes for dialogue (UK) and it still worked. Almost. Because I can’t remove the sentence in between the dialogue. Like below:
‘Anything?’ the Mayor pressed. ‘A glass of wine? Milk?’
How would I remove the mayor pressed if there a way to do this?
Thank you again. Very good answer.
oggers
It worked flawlessly for me with a copy of your post, so I’m at a loss. All I get is ‘Anything?’‘A glass of wine? Milk?’
I think it is is because it is within a paragraph as you mentioned originally.
Thanks for your help.
That has nothing to do with it. As long as the complete quotation is in a single paragraph, the search pattern should work fine. Please post the exact code of your search pattern, if you didn’t copy mine (I recommend that you copy it, and only replace the quotation marks, as every single character is essential).
Yes you are right. Thanks again