Find Text - how to work with parentheses and brackets?

Rhino Rhino for Windows
, , ,
1

So, I was just trying to bulk rename some material descriptions on a drawing that contained parentheses and it failed. So I conducted this experiment:

I created a Text field with the following content:

ASDF (test)
ASDF [test]
ASDF {test}
ASDF <test>

obrazek
obrazek557×565 20.1 KB

Trying to Find (test) and Replace with abc results in:

ASDF (abc)
ASDF [test]
ASDF {test}
ASDF <test>

Trying to Find [test] and Replace with abc results in:

ASDF (abcest)
ASDF [test]
ASDF {test}
ASDF <test>

Trying to Find [test] but clicking Replace All results in this craziness:

ASDF (abcabcabcabc)
ASDF [abcabcabcabc]
ASDF {abcabcabcabc}
ASDF <abcabcabcabc>

Don’t even try to run this on a whole a document full of other text fields and annotations, it will replace every t, e and s with abc, both in model space and all layouts:

obrazek
obrazek226×253 1.85 KB

Trying to find individual ( or [ does nothing.

Curly brackets and angle brackets work as expected:

ASDF (test)
ASDF [test]
ASDF abc
ASDF abc

I tried a few other special characters at random and most work, only + failed but there could be other I didn’t try.

2

you need to escape (some) special characters:
serch for

\[test\]

where the \ is the escaping
\\ will find \

not sure the search field might also support regular expressions… did you check the help ?

EDIT:
the help is a great place to start searching:

.NET regular expressions are supported to find strings with patterns.

chat gpt and other KI s a great for helping with reg ex.

does not look like a bug to me.
Maybe change the title of your topic ?
“FindText how to find special characters”

3

Ah, gotcha. It honestly didn’t even cross my mind that FindText supports regex. Maybe there could be some mouse over helping tip somewhere in the dialogue or something?