Excluding ‘+’ signs in UI strings from word count

Question

I am setting up a project in Studio 2022 for 116 Excel files of UI strings. The strings look like this: 
 head north to + [street_name] + and turn right 
 The parameters in square brackets, such as "[street_name]," do not need to be translated, so I set up a regex rule below, and it works fine. 
 Start Tag: $$ 
 End Tag: $$ 
 Non-translatable 
 However, even though the text in square brackets is locked, there is a large number of &lsquo;+&rsquo; signs throughout the files, and I suspect they significantly increase the word count. 
 
 I would like to know how to exclude the &lsquo;+&rsquo; sign from the word count. 
 Thank you in advance.

Paul · Accepted Answer

Olena Polissky 
 Why don't you include them in the tag? 
 Start tag: (?:\+\s)?$$ 
 End tag: (?:$$)(\s\+)? 
 I made the plus symbols optional in case you didn't always get the plus signs in this string.

Paul · Answer

Olena Polissky 
 If it's '=*' meaning just =* then use a placeholder as opposed to a tag pair and just use this: 
 =\* 
 A star has a special purpose in regex so you have to escape it with the backslash when you actually need to find it. In .NET (or C#) regular expressions (which is the flavour Trados Studio uses), the star symbol (*) is a quantifier that matches the preceding element zero or more times. This means that the element before the * can appear any number of times, including not at all. 
 Olena Polissky said: I feel that I need to know the programming language to set up those regex, which I do not. Is there a list of all the regex available somewhere that can be used for reference? 
 Regex, short for regular expressions, is not typically described as a programming language. It's just a powerful tool, or a form of syntax used for matching patterns within strings. There are many free tutorials on the internet that are helpful for this as it's a syntax used in many many types of software including decent text editors like Notepad++ for example. But here's a few to help you get started: 
 Tutorials 
 https://www.regular-expressions.info/ 
 https://regexone.com/ 
 Testers 
 Paid for: https://www.regexbuddy.com/ 
 Free: https://regex101.com/ 
 Studio Related 
 https://multifarious.filkin.com/tag/regex-tutorial/ 
 https://www.web-translations.com/blog/regular-expressions/ 
 https://noradiaz.blogspot.com/2019/10/regular-expressions-for-translators_24.html 
 Probably many more if you search around. There was a book written by a regular contributor to this forum and I was sure it used to be on the appstore. But I cannot find it... perhaps someone will see this and point to it! I think that could also be quite helpful.

Trados Studio > 5. Regex and XPath

Excluding ‘+’ signs in UI strings from word count

Top Replies