Saturday, May 02, 2009

Beware the awesome power of Find and Replace

For some reason, no doubt incredibly important at the time, I decided change the name of a supporting character in WIW/WIP from Chris to Jason. It was less than thirty seconds work with Find and Replace.

And that is how I ended up with another character suddenly renamed 'Jasontine' and the festive season newly dubbed 'Jasontmas'.

24 comments:

fairyhedgehog said...

Oh no. Find and Replace can be so very stupid.

McKoala said...

I love the way you blame F&R, and not the operator! Blowing koala kisses to you! (I retract my evil teeth for those).

Whirlochre said...

Jasontmas? I bet there are Neighbours fans living in your street who still celebrate that one.

jjdebenedictis said...

Hee! I remember a writing book where the author admonished the reader to never name a character "Will" unless they were certain they wouldn't change the name at a later date.

I suspect there's a similar tale of writerly heartache behind that bit of advice.

Spy Scribbler said...

Oh no, that is hilarious! Hah! :-)

Spy Scribbler said...

(Although, I'm sorry, probably not hilarious when you're cleaning it up!)

Sarah Laurenson said...

I had that same problem and learned I had to choose a few extra options - whole word and match case. It's a pain to learn the hard way though.

Robin B. said...

Ha - sweet (recent) memories. JB told me it was easy to find and replace to change a name.

So I did.

Same result as you had - one big good time.

JaneyV said...

I have never heard of this FIND AND REPLACE. I am such a Rookie.

It's going to be fun calling Chris, Jason till way past when it's old!

Sylvia said...

LOL! I can totally understand how that can happen.

I worked very briefly at British Gas where, I swear to god, they made you type out the letters to the customers EVERY DAMN TIME even though they were all the same.

So basically you either had to type out "Someone will be stopping by in the morning" or "Someone will be stopping by in the afternoon" depending on the shift allocated to the address. I thought a sensible short cut was to type A.M. and P.M. and then use find and replace to put in the full sentences.

I got a commendation for working through the backlog of letters so quickly!

Then Mr In the morning Patel rang up to complain :/

McKoala said...

Thanks for the sympathy, and empathy, and Sylvia - ouch! Where was Mr in the morning Patel's sense of humour? I think that's hilarious!

Whirl, it's a little-known fact that Neighbours is actually more popular in the UK than it is here! Neighbours fans...spoiler coming up...Harold has just left the series here - forever this time - so enjoy him for the year or so you have left.

Chris Eldin said...

LOL! I did that before. It's not you. We can't all be that stupid...
:-)

Aniket Thakkar said...

Hi,

I followed you here after seeing Aerin all scared of your Sever threat level. It takes a lot to scare that lady! :D

But now I recall your stunner entry in 'Ascension' too. Wonder how come I didn't stop by earlier.

You have a great blog, One I intend to follow. :D

The power of 'Find and Replace' comes second only to the almighty combination of "Ctrl + Alt + Del" :-)

McKoala said...

Oh, Chris, you'd be surprised...

Thanks Aniket! The Koala is nice to new arrivals. For a while...

Sandra Cormier said...

Hahaha! You are now officially the queen of click-click-clickety click click!

ssas said...

Yeah, it takes some doing. Annoying, eh?

I lurve lurve lurve the name Jason. I got one of those in Sentinel.

PJD said...

I see you have found the other edge of this double edged sword.

LOL @Sylvia and JJdeB.

Way back in 1999 when I was managing a web site for this small startup company where I worked, I had no HTML tools and did all the coding by hand. So one day instead of manually editing each of the 80+ HTML files to make a simple change in product name, I cleverly wrote a perl script to do the work for me.

Five minutes later, I found that instead of "search and replace," my script had accomplished "search and destroy" and had truncated every one of the 80+ files at zero bytes. (In non-tech terms, it means I erased the entire web site.)

Thank goodness our ISP had a backup from two days earlier. Backups are useful things.

McKoala said...

'search and destroy'! Sorry, but gotta giggle...

McKoala said...

And today I found a character under pressure exclaming 'Jasont!'

I need to do a reverse find and replace exercise. Checking every word on the way.

Sarah Laurenson said...

You can do that or you can do a find and replace all of Jasona, Jasonb, Jasonc... with Chris.

Sarah Laurenson said...

I mean Chrisa, Chrisb...

Sarah Laurenson said...

I think I'm going to start using "Jasont!"

Sarah Laurenson said...

Oh, and then I would search on Chris and make sure of the capitalizations. I'm assuming less Chris's than Jason's at this point.

writtenwyrdd said...

Oh indeed this has happened to me a time or twenty. Even when you are being careful and mean to hit the Find Next, I've managed to hit the Replace All without thinking.