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Thursday, August 19, 2004  Small caps, small (very small) wonders  This is how dorky I am: I'm removing the small caps formatting from the abbreviations "A.D." and "B.C." in the book I'm working on, and after a couple of quick global find-and-replace searches I wanted to see if I'd missed any, so I did a regular expression for the opening <small> tag followed by any of the letters, and I thought it was really cool that it was <small>[ABCD]—hey, look, the start of the alphabet! (And then I thought "I am such a dork.") Actually (regular-expression geek alert), it's moderately useful, because I can trim a character from the regex now: [A-D] instead of [ABCD]. Although at the speed level I'm working at, eliminating those eight bits isn't going to make a huge efficiency difference. Ooohhhh, I just thought of something even better: if I also have to search for the more-secular abbreviations of "B.C.E." and "C.E.," I can use [ABCDE] or even [A-E]. (Other regular-expression geeks will be pointing out that I'm not including the period in that class expression. Theoretically the period wouldn't be directly after the small-caps tag; but to be complete, <small>[A-E.].) I'm way too excited about that. It's high time I left the office for the day... [ at 5:57 PM • by Abby • permalink •   ]

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