I found myself badly needing the ability to search for a particular string of text, which it turns out is impossible to do in DEVONthink. To wit, I need to find everything that contains the text “[TABLE]”, and I learned today that’s a no-no on two counts:
- DT does not support searching for special characters like ‘[’ and ‘]’ because it indexes only alphanumeric characters if I understand correctly (that search will actually find a gazillion records because it treats the word ‘TABLE’ as a character class).
- Arguably worse, there is no way to do a case-sensitive search in DT. I can hardly believe this, seeing how important it often is to be able to distinguish capitalized versions of a word from its more common lower/mixed-case versions in computing.
As such, I seem to be stuck with only fallback options. Like searching for the word “TABLE” and then saving those results somehow to prune them later. Forgive me if there’s an obvious way to do this, but I’m venturing outside my comfort zone in this task. I thought maybe I could use replicants as those seemed promising. I created a fresh database to hold my search results, added a group named “Import Cleanup” and performed a search. I saw I could easily right-click my 436 results and choose the option to create replicants, only when I selected the recently created group, DT just beeped at me and did nothing.
I don’t know why it’s failing to do that as I find I can Cmd + Option + drag those selected search items onto the newly created group and create replicants just fine. So I’m off to the races after all it seems. My question is this: is there some better way to complete my task? I essentially need to weed out all the false positives from the search, then edit the resulting items across all my databases one at a time to fix up the places were tables could not be imported from the original OneNote files that spawned the content. Thanks in advance for any thoughts folks might have.
UPDATE: Scratch that. Even though the cursor seemed to indicate I would be creating replicants of the things in my databases, it appears I was actually copying those 436 items. Nuts. Bottom line: I would still appreciate any suggestions as to how to accomplish my task. Thanks!