Count with Find and Replace
Mac Tip #270/22-Nov-2006

A reader reminded me that Find and Replace is a quick way to do some counting in your text. For example, perhaps you need to count how many times you’ve used a particular word — did you mention Product A as often as you mentioned Product B? Or perhaps you’d like to make sure you closed all the brackets you used.

Call up the Find and Replace dialog box for your software and enter your Search term, perhaps Apple, then put the same term in the Replace section. You’re replacing a word with the same word.

Now click Replace All. Most software gives you some kind of acknowledgement of how many replaces it made — perhaps as a simple count in the still open Find and Replace dialog box, or maybe in a separate alert, as you can see in the screenshots.

Be careful though: watch out for words embedded in other words. If you need to count how often you’ve used the word ‘the’, then you should include a space after it, otherwise the program may also count anything where those letters appear consecutively such as in ‘there’, ‘either’ or ‘clothes’. Even the trailing space may not be sufficient, for some Blithe Spirits.

Next week: Replace in technicolour.