We really like the new filtering option introduced in 2021 (and also in the Community advanced display filter for 2019). But there is one thing that we haven’t discovered how to do and that we often need to do: Filter after empty segments. Is there any way to do that? And ideally also insert a specific content (e.g, a space) into all segments that correspond to your filtering.
Typically empty segments would be "Not Translated":
So easily filtered. But sometimes they may be empty and not have the status "Not Translated" in which case it now becomes trickier. So here you could search for a regex like this in the target:
^$
So also not too tricky.
And ideally also insert a specific content (e.g, a space) into all segments that correspond to your filtering.
That should be simple... or so I thought. But it's actually not simple because you can't replace the results of a search that finds nothing, with something.
So I have a question here... why is this important?
Tagging two people I'm pretty sure mentioned this in the past...
Paul Filkin | RWS Group
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You're right Paul, from my perspective the usecase would be more or less the same as in the other thread.
For whoever asked the question in this thread, there obviously is a usecase for being able to search replace nothing, with something. Would it be possible to program the Find and Replace tool to recognise ^$ or is that too difficult? I'm presuming that these questions were asked remotely and that you don't know specifically who asked them in order to find out what their particular usecase is.
I have never received a job that had lots of segments with no translation that needed to be filled with a space. I'm trying to imagine when that would be a usecase but can think of nothing, apart from a poor quality PDF as described by Jerzy but in that usecase when translating, I would tidy up the source .docx file before translating in a new project. If, as has happened, I received a translation to proofread that had been translated with all the rubbish still in the file, ideally I would still use a new .docx file and pretranslate it using the translated content, before then proofreading it. If for some reason I couldn't I would be looking at each individual segment anyway and, when populating the first instance of a segment that needs just a space to prevent the source from flowing into the target document, a space is successfully autopropagated to all the repetitions so that would work fine for me.
Therefore, I don't see a usecase for being able to search replace nothing with something that would be pertinent to my usual workflow.
Thanks,
Ali 
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