AutoCAD 2013/2014 DWG Format

[#1]

Hi All,

I must not understand anymore how to use the Find function. And i say "anymore" because i used this in past releases without confusion but since my recent upgrade to 2013 it appears to work differently. I recently upgraded from 2011 and got a new computer at the same time so i don't have 2011 installed anymore to test this there but here is my confusion.

If you refer to the attached PNG you will see the Find and Replace dialog box and four (4) objects; the two black objects are blocks with one attribute whose tag is INSTANCE and values are visible, and the two red objects are mtext. What i want to do is find all blocks whose attribute is "FA-1" but not "FA-10" however i can't seem to separate them as the function either finds all the FA-1 AND FA-10 combinded or it finds none of them.

If i check "Find whole words only" it doesn't find anything and it doesn't seem to matter if it is text or blocks.

Please help me retain what sanity i have left.

Sal

[#2]

I can also reproduce your issue in Acad2012.

The culprit here seems to be the dash character (-). It is not considered as part of your word like any other alphabetical characters. Instead, AutoCAD treats it as a word separator. So in FA-1 and FA-10, if you search for FA-1, you get no results because of the dash. But if you search for FA, it will return FA-1 and FA-10. And if you search for 1, it will return FA-1 only.

Personnally, just like you I hate the fact that AutoCAD treats the dash sign that way because the dash sign is commonly used as part of a word for technical drawings.

 Maybe you can find some workaround with Wildcards.

[#3]

Hi JF_005,

Thanks for the explanation of why we are getting the results we're getting. Unfortunately, i can't mark this as a "solution" because...well...its not. Hopefully someone at Autodesk will see this and agree that the dash is and should be a searchable character.

Sal

[#4 · Accepted solution]

Here's another way to deal with it: (disable the "Find whole words only" option)

If we take your image as an example, in the result list, you can click on the "Text" column to sort all the "FA-1" strings together. Then highlight all your "FA-1" rows in the result list. There are buttons to the right of the result list. Click the "Create Selection Set (Highlighted)" button. Now your entity selection contains only the objects with "FA-1". With that new selection set, now you can do a new Find/Replace without having to filter unwanted results.

It takes more steps and time to perfrom so I hope you don't have to do it hundreds of times.

[#5]

Hi JF_005,

By George, I think you've got it. But we found that after the sort and then the selection of the ones we want to change, if we then just pick the "Replace" (not the Replace All) button, we get what we wanted without the need to create a selection set and return to the Find command.

Thanks for your help and suggestions.

Sal

[#6]

Wow! Thanks for the "Replace" solution. This will be really useful for me as well.

We really learned a lot in this post

[#7]

I love it when we pull together and find a solution. I just love it.

Thanks again for all your help.

[#8]

In the hope that it helps someone else coming across this, I will add this to the post, because I figured it out after reading the tip to uncheck the "whole word search".

Apparently, one of the things that is a default is to that the "List results" box unchecked. I don't remember ever checking it before, so when I typed something into the search field, and only got one result, and no options on the right side of the dialog to "Select highlighted" or "Select all" I was panicked!