How to use Find and Replace using Wildcards

[Anonymous]

I'm having trouble finding the right wildcard combination to get the find&replace to work the way I would like.

I have several street names that I'm wanting to keep the main names and add text to the end of it. With the example below what should I put in the find field and the replace field of the dialog box?

EX:

Say I have the following streets:

Street A

Street B

Street C

Street D

And I want to find all of them and change them all at once, using replace, to turn them to:

Street A (Private)

Street B (Private)

Street C (Private)

Street D (Private)

Is this possible using the Find & Replace using some wildcards?

In my attempts so far, AutoCAD either didn't find them or replaced the text with the wildcard character.

Thank you,

Michael

[imadHabash]

Hi,

i suggest to read what you asked in this AKN article . >> Click <<

regards,

[Vinayv4v]

Hello,

Try the BFIND Lisp from Lee Mac. it is also helpful when you have to change texts in multiple drawings.

http://www.lee-mac.com/bfind.html

[john.vellek · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous,

In my experience, the wildcards work great in the FIND part of this and not at all in the REPLACE.  I think you will likely need an add-in such JTB Batch Change found in the Autodesk App Store. I see that @Vinayv4v also recommends another.

Please select the Accept as Solution button if my post solves your issue or answers your question.

[Anonymous]

I have seen this article or articles similar to this. It works for finding the text but trying to replace them all at the same time I can't seem to get it to work.

[john.vellek]

Hi @Anonymous,

I am checking back to see if my post or others helped you with your problem. Please add a post with how you decide to proceed and your results so other Community members may benefit.

Please hit the Accept as Solution button if a post or posts solves your issue or answers your question.

[Anonymous]

John,

From what you said wildcards can not be used in the REPLACE field. Is that correct?

This would be really desirable.. to implement in next releases. Use of Regex + Wildcards.

Thanks

[john.vellek]

Hi @Anonymous,

Yes, I don't feel that the wildcards function at all in the replace o=portion of this process which is why I recommended some of the add-ins that seem to doe this better than core AutoCAD.

Thank you for posting about this issue in the forums. I see that this issue is already logged with the development team for further investigation.

You are also welcome to contact the product team directly. If you have additional comments specific to the software or its functionality for future consideration, please use the Product Feedback page. How to provide feedback on Autodesk products goes into more detail.

Another great option is to participate in the AutoCAD Customer Council. This is an opportunity for our customers to partner with the AutoCAD development team to improve future releases of AutoCAD by giving continuous feedback on ideas, designs, and early builds.
In order to get involved email autocad.beta@autodesk.com or autocad.lt.council@autodesk.com

[vandenoosterkamp]

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@Anonymous wrote:

John,

From what you said wildcards can not be used in the REPLACE field. Is that correct?

This would be really desirable.. to implement in next releases.

---

When we're lucky the 2050 version will have this.

[vandenoosterkamp]

-find would do the trick also in most cases because a script can be written easily in excel for it. Unfortunatelly we get les and less functions that work without popup

[ryan_mechamXZX7K]

So you cannot do this as a single step however you can do it as a multistep process still much faster than manually

First do a find **## where ** is your wildcards and ## is the non wildcard part 

then in the find box you can do create selection set from all that are found. This will select all instances in the drawing.

then redo your find command and just do the replacement part on the selected objects