1

My document has many commands like

\solution{
...
}

Now, I want to replace all those commands with

\begin{solution}
...
\end{solution}

Is there any way to do this with a macro?

campa
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anhvnh
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  • Please clarify your specific problem or provide additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it's hard to tell exactly what you're asking. – Community Apr 02 '22 at 08:22
  • Do you mean you literally want to replace \solution{Foo} with \begin{solution}Foo \end{solution} in your code? – Ingmar Apr 02 '22 at 12:29
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    What about using regex? (this doesn't have much to do with TeX though.) – user202729 Apr 02 '22 at 12:59
  • A slight confusion is that TeX calls \solution a macro. Changing \solution{ to \begin{solution} (along the lines of what Ingmar suggests) would be a simple search and replace. Spotting the } to become \end{solution} would be much harder, and probably best done manually alongside the search and replace. – Teepeemm Apr 02 '22 at 13:38
  • @Teepeemm: If that's what he wants, it doesn't have to be hard at all. “Regular expressions” FTW, most advanced editors support them. ETA: See FHZ's answer. – Ingmar Apr 02 '22 at 17:15
  • I removed the tag [tag:macros] as this should be used only for TeX macros. – campa Apr 02 '22 at 17:29

2 Answers2

2

Regular expressions are an art of its own. Unfortunately some editors have problems with them. TeXstudio for example has some difficult to handle multiple line searchs as said in this answer. It took me some time to recognize and learn about this limitation.

Therefore, I will present three solutions.

First solution

Use https://regexr.com/.

This site helps a lot to test regular expressions and is a little bit better than TeXstudio. Copy your text into the Text are, insert both search and replace syntax and copy the results.

The syntax you are looking for is: \\solution\{((.|\n)+?)\}, and the replace syntax is: \begin{solution}$1\end{solution}.

The base text and result is presented below

\solution{
  ABC
  BCD
  CDE
}

\solution{
  D
  E 
}


\solution{
  F
}

enter image description here

Warning: I don't know if this syntax will work for anything inside your macro. I wrote it to stop when finding }.

Second solution

Search with F3, replace with F4.

First step is to configure some Shortcuts in TeXstudio. I suggest F4 combinations for Replace; Shift+F4 for Replace Prev; and Ctrl+Shift+F4 for Replace All. So you can search with F3 and replace with F4 as fast as you can without replacing non desired text.

enter image description here

In this solution, you'll do two sets of searchs. First, \solution{ to \begin{solution}. This replacement will probably be possible with Ctrl+Shift+F4.

enter image description here

The second set is looking for } and replacing for \end{solution}. This is clearly the main drawback of this solution. It is not so simple to identify a single } that is the exactly match for the previously \solution{ without actually search through lines and keeping record of opens and closes along the way. Therefore the F3 and F4 trick makes you do this search automatically and replace manually.

enter image description here

enter image description here

Edit: It may be easier if you search and replace first for } and then \solution{.

Third solution

Well, this may not be an elegante solution, but let's cheat a little bit with the tools we have.

Let's assume the only } in your file are the closure of your \solution{, in this case the cheat is to replace them first and then the \solution{. It probably is not a good solution for a file with many thing mixed, but it is a good example of how to avoid complex regex syntax by splitting the problem in small pieces.

As you asked for a TeXstudio macro, let's use it to. The syntax is

%SCRIPT
editor.replace(/\}/,"g","\\end{solution}")
editor.replace(/\\solution\{/,"g","\\begin{solution}")

where %SCRIPT is mandatory, and the /.../ are used for regex expression, despite not being strictly necessary in our case. Also notice the double \\ because we need one \ for the LaTeX command and the first is to recognize the second.

enter image description here

And voilá, it works like a charm, a cheap and cheated charm, but a charm.

Conclusion

Aim for the first solution, learn how to use de second to handle special cases, keep the third in your pocket for emergencies.

FHZ
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1

In TeXStudio replace option with regex doesn't support new lines match for some reason.

So I came up with a trick where you grab all text in your document as a string and apply regex to it and new lines will be matched as well.

Here's a macro that solves your problem. Note that it also support any nested curly brackets as well.

%SCRIPT
regexParsed = editor.text().replace(/\\solution{([^}{]*({.*})*[^}{]*)}/gm, '\\begin{solution}$1\\end{solution}').replace(/\r/g, '');
editor.setText(regexParsed)

enter image description here

antshar
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