Find and replace first two characters of text problem

I have about 10,000 pieces of individual text items (some is text, some is mtext) containing numbers that each are similar to the format "88XXX.XXX" where X is other numbers. I want to remove the two leading characters ('88' in this case) off of all pieces of selected text. I tried to do this with find/replace however some strings contain numbers such as 88562.881" where find/replace with '88*' as the find parameter and nothing as the replace parameter will then make the text to be 562.1 when I need the text to be 562.881. Am I just using find/replace and wildcards wrongly or does anyone know of an alternative way I could make this work? Cheers.

Is there a space in front of the 88? If so, include it in the find. If there is no space, um well I'm not sure either, yet. A space is a locatable character. If the number is the only thing on the text item without a leading space it won't work, but if there is you can use the space.

I suggest you check out this gem from Lee Mac

http://www.lee-mac.com/bfind.html

It will do just about anything you ask it to,

and as we (his long time benefactors/fan base) have come to expect, with Lee's brilliant lisps,

will save you an incredible amount of time and effort.

Thanks Lee!

Is there a space in front of the 88? If so, include it in the find. If there is no space, um well I'm not sure either, yet. A space is a locatable character. If the number is the only thing on the text item without a leading space it won't work, but if there is you can use the space.

No space infront.

I suggest you check out this gem from Lee Mac

 

http://www.lee-mac.com/bfind.html

 

It will do just about anything you ask it to,

and as we (his long time benefactors/fan base) have come to expect, with Lee's brilliant lisps,

will save you an incredible amount of time and effort.

 

Thanks Lee!

Thanks, I found I already had that lisp installed

However it seems to do the same as the default AutoCad find/replace and I can't see any extra functionality that works for this specific case?

How about '88***.' if you include the decimal point it is unlikely to find text with two decimal points ! you might want to run it a couple of times if you have to deal with larger or smaller numbers.

How about '88***.' if you include the decimal point it is unlikely to find text with two decimal points ! you might want to run it a couple of times if you have to deal with larger or smaller numbers.

For the example piece of text "88125.881"

Find "88***." and replace with "" (i.e. nothing) gives the result "881"

Find "88***." and replace with "***.*" gives the result "***.*881". I.e. asterisks are actually added to the text.

It doesn't seem to work like the rename function unfortunately (where wildcards do work well).

I keep going back to this, ridiculous, there is no way to get it to leave the wildcard sections as the original, when you do a replace.

I found/modified a lisp that sort of does what I want by removing the first character of the text items. Then just running the lisp a second time to remove the second character. Thread on that here: http://www.cadtutor.net/forum/showthread.php?91296-Basic-lisp-help-with-str-manipulation&p=625013#post625013

It does seem a bit ridiculous although I presumed it was more just me failing at using wildcards properly. http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?155351-Using-wild-cards-in-both-find-and-replace[url=http://www.cadtutor.net/forum/showthread.php?91296-Basic-lisp-help-with-str-manipulation&p=625013#post625013][/url] explains the problem better than I do and is exactly the same as what I want to do; unfortunately no solution forthat one either.