Displayr's Find and Replace capabilities are quite robust, and enable you to search and edit your document in bulk. This article discusses how to use Wildcards to edit select labels in your document in bulk.
To access this feature, you can hit Ctrl+F or select This Document next to the Search bar at the top.
A pane will pop up on the left of the page with a tabs for Find and Replace. Results which match your search term will be listed in the bottom left corner of the Displayr window, and they will also be highlighted in yellow where they appear in your document. You can click on entries under RESULTS to jump to the position of the variable, text, table, or other item that has been identified.
The Replace section allows you to replace the search term with a new term in the result that you have selected currently, or in the entire document.
Requirements
Familiarity with Wildcards. Wildcards allow you to create rules whereby you find and replace text even where there are not exact matches.
| * | Matches anything. e.g. "Ages * and up" would match "Ages seven and up". |
| # | Matches a single numeral (or the character #). e.g. "Q#" would match "Q7". |
| ? | Matches a single character. e.g. "Part ?" would match "Part A". |
You can use the special text ${0} in Replace with to quote the original text that was found in the search. For example, to append "POST" to the end of a set of variable labels:
Find what: *
Replace with: ${0}POST
Note that wildcards do not apply when doing replacements on JavaScript formulas which have more than one line of code.
Method - Choosing what you want to search/edit
The FIND IN section allows you to narrow down what items in your document you search through. This includes specific options of Items on pages, Variables, Raw Data. For example you can choose Variables > Variable labels to only search through variable labels in your document. You can also select specific items in the document and check Only search selected items. This is most useful when you are using Replace to edit variable labels in bulk.
Method - Allowing for advanced find/replace
The ADVANCED section has settings for how to work with the Find and Replace verbatims. Match will only match to the pattern at a specific part of the label. For example, if you use Match > Start for Coke, you will only match part of the variables in the selection:
Here you can also check Use wildcards to enable that functionality.
Method - Using wildcards to edit labels in bulk
Be sure ADVANCED > Use wildcards is checked for this functionality. Say you have the following variables:
They weren't labeled with a question and you need to add it to the beginning of the labels for the label tidying to work. You can Find > * and Replace > Q5: ${0} to get:
Now say for the variables above you only want to append a label (red) to the end of the Coke variables. You can Find > *Coke* and Replace > ${0} (red) to only rename those variables: