Grep for the win

Limitation of SuperMemo search feature

SuperMemo search is limited to plain text and there is no support for regular expressions as searches are implemented using assembly language. This is not the end. You can overcome such limitation by using a third party tool and searching into the files externally. My prefered choice is grepWin, a free and open source solution.

GrepWin

grepWin is a simple search and replace tool which can use regular expressions to do its job. This allows to do much more powerful searches and replaces.

Download: GitHub

HTML search

HTML collection search

• searching for a specific CSS class, from wiki, online dictionary etc.
• searching for a word of expression inside a specific tag.
  • searching for wikipedia portals

regular expression search

• searching for words or phrases for collocations using regular expressions.
• search text containing certain scripts (Greek, Cyrillic, devanagari, Kanji, etc)

Cross collection HTML search

Perhaps the biggest perk of using grep is that you can access to all .htm files in your SuperMemo, not limited to a particular collection. This is specially useful if you use multiple collections in the same language.

HTML search&replace

Changing the color of the hard-coded styled blue text when splitting topics

search for: <font color="blue">

replace by: <font class="bluesplit">

I recomend using a CSS class instead of hard-coding a different color. CSS class have an advantage of style to any color via template which you could change any time, or even have different colors for different templates.

Convering HTML clozes to plain text in bulk

Search for: <span class=cloze>[...]</span>

Replace by: [...]