Is there a more automatic way to remove the extra space between English text/numbers and a Chinese character?

Question

Dear Studio 2017 users, 
 I just completed a big editing job where the client no longer wants a space between English text/numbers and a Chinese character, the style that was used previously. I ended up spending 20-25% of the editing time manually removing these extra spaces from the matches coming from the project TM. 
 Is there a way or an app that can automatically remove these spaces for me? Also, in some cases, the text/Chinese character is surround by a formatting tag pair, and the extra space is either before the opening tag or after. I wonder if there is a way/expression that can ignore the tags and find/delete the extra space before the tag. 
 Thank you in advance for any suggestions! 
 Chunyi

Paul · Answer

Hi Chunyi, 
 
Did you try this with the SDLXLIFF Toolkit? We made some fixes to this tool a few months ago to handle something like this where Studio fails with the out of the box search and replace. It would be really helpful if you created some small examples of the text in a file when you ask questions like this because then we won't spend so much time going backwards and forwards suggesting things that don't work for you. Just create a small word file containing the examples in a few segments and attach to your post. 
 
Regards 
 
Paul

Paul · Answer

Hi Chunyi,

You could click on "Advanced Editing Options" and then you can load your files there too.

Quite tricky to find rules for all cases and some of them, around the tags for example I can only solve by working directly on the SDLXLIFF in a decent text editor. So if I search for this:

([\u4E00-\u9FA5])\s(<[^/]+>\d)|([\u4E00-\u9FA5]<[^/]+>)\s(\d)

And replace with this:

$1$2$3$4

Then this will resolve the ones with spaces either side of the tags. The ones without tags at all I presume you have no problem with as these are easily handled in the Studio Editor or the Toolkit for example.

Paul · Answer

64-bit is the way to go... more performant! 
 
The huge chunk of strange characters are just the encoded embedded file. This is what allows you to send the sdlxliff alone to someone and they will be able to save the target file. The text you'll be changing is below all of that. So don't worry about it, but don't change any of it.

Paul · Answer

Unknown said: I am very happy to learn that the ones without tags can be handled using the Toolkit. 
 Could also be handled using the out of the box search and replace in Studio!

Paul · Answer

Unknown said: Paul, in fact I don't know how to remove the instances of extra spaces that do not involve tags using search and replace in Studio. 
 Use Ctrl+H to bring up the replace dialogue then two two operations. First to find Chinese characters followed by a space and a number. 
 Search for: 
 ([\u4E00-\u9FA5])\s(\d) 
 Replace with: 
 $1$2 
 Then repeat for numbers followed by a Chinese character (this looked appropriate from your test files... but you be the judge of that). 
 Search for: 
 (\d)\s([\u4E00-\u9FA5]) 
 Replace with: 
 $1$2 
 You've got RegexBuddy... try it out! 
 Regards 
 Paul

Paul · Answer

It sure does... always has done! Make sure you activate that you are using regular expressions at the bottom of the window. Might say "wildcards" by default.

Paul · Answer

So try this too:

Trados Studio > 6. Regex and XPath

Is there a more automatic way to remove the extra space between English text/numbers and a Chinese character?