Under Community Review

Search function should find all types of space

It is not currently possible to enter a non-breaking space (Ctrl+Shift+Space) in the Editor's search function. If I search for a phrase which has a non-breaking space in it, Studio will not find it unless I use a star symbol (Two*words). In this scenario, it would of course not find ordinary spaces.

I initially reported this as a bug and was told that the search function is a basic function which is not designed to cope with this sort of thing. I therefore suggest that the search function should be programmed to find all types of space and not to "discriminate". This is how Microsoft Word works.

The search function is primarily a linguistic function and, by definition, the translator does not always know what he/she is searching for. It is better to find too much than to be at risk of missing something.

Trados Studio Ideas search function with 'Two*words with spaces in between' entered, showing an 'Information' pop-up with 'Find complete: no matches found.'

Luke Potter
  • in reply to Nora Díaz

    To rebounce on this what I am missing is the "non-breaking space" in the QA . In French, Studio does detect that the "non-breaking space" before punctuation is correct but does not inform if it is missing before the same punctuation. Or I have not yet found how to do that...

  • in reply to Jerzy Czopik

    Absolutely agree that the search should be precise. But perhaps this would be better as part of an extended search function. Specifically searching for non-breaking spaces is reasonably advanced stuff and won’t be relevant for most searches. I would expect a basic function to find all spaces (as is the case in Word/Acrobat).

    My basic point here is that I expect to easily find all uses of an expression. I can’t know if the author has dropped a non-breaking space in somewhere. I haven’t got the time to add long strings every time I do a search on the off-chance that there might be a non-breaking space in the document.

  • In addition to what others have said, you can always use regular expressions:

    U+00A0|\s

    will find either a non-breaking space or a regular one.

    You can expand the pattern to make it fit anything you need before and after the spaces.

    Trados Studio 'Buscar y reemplazar' dialog box showing a search for non-breaking or regular spaces using regular expressions.

  • in reply to Luke Potter

    Also, Alt+0160 might work... that's the code for non-breaking space...

  • Enter ALT+0160 for a NBSP there. It is not desired, that entering a simple space shall find any kind of space. The search must be precise and find exactly the space entered.