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Any good options to prune out similar-but-variable bits of text from a large document? (self.techsupport)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by Sterile_Technique to c/techsupport

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Nursing student here!

So we get a shit load of reading assignments, and since everything's digital nowadays, I've been leaning a lot on text-to-speech software that effectively converts reading assignments to listening assignments.

The problem is textbooks have a LOT of just... noise. Every image has something like "FIGURE 13.5 SURGICAL DISASTERS!" "FIGURE 13.6 YOU GOT SUMMONED TO COURT!" etc. In-text citations are EVERYWHERE, copyright info is EVERYWHERE... reading the content, you just skip over all that crap, but pasting it into a TTS service, all that trash gets spoken aloud and adds up to a huge time sink every chapter, and distracts from the actual lesson.

Googling it, the best I've been able to come up with is doing a find and replace in MS word for things like FIGURE **.*^13 with wildcards on and the replace field blank... but it's not very consistent - sometimes it works, sometimes not. Same with nuking parenthesis and the text within with \(*\)

All that said, I'm wondering if I'm approaching this wrong by using MS word in the first place. Would be absolutely amazing if I could save all the commands on standby, then run them at the same time. By end of the school program, we're talking like 100 chapters from multiple books, so anything that lets me just nuke huge batches of BS as quickly as possible and dive right into the listening would be a godsend.

Thanks all!!

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[–] LANA_DEL_KARENINA 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The good news: there is a tool built to solve this exact problem: regular expressions (aka regex)

The bad news: regular expressions are famously frustrating to read and write

Depending on how badly you want the problem solved and how patient you are, using online resources to craft some regular expressions would be the ticket

[–] Sterile_Technique 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

hmmm "famously frustrating", presumably to people who know what they're doing, very likely translates to "WAY outside of my skill level". Worth some digging though, especially now that I have a keyword! Thank you!!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

There are regex tutorials online, and you can test your regex there.

I'd say, since you're learning, this could be an opportunity that may be useful later.

Just start with one relatively simple thing, like maybe copyright stuff. Work on getting regex to match that properly throughout a doc, and enjoy the improvement. Then when ready, tackle the next thing.

[–] Sterile_Technique 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I wish I had asked this sooner. I don't know really any code at all, but this might be the thing that pushes me to learn some. This looks crazy useful. Time is the enemy right now though - I've only got a few free evenings left before class starts, and I don't trust that I'd know it well enough not to shoot myself in the foot.

When the next break rolls around though, I think regex will be my project. Any foundation you'd recommend learning first? From the bit of searching I've done, regex seems to feed straight into conversations about Python or Java - I don't know any of that. Would it even make sense to try to learn regex without first knowing the basics of a coding language?

I did manage to fine-tune MS Word's find and replace commands... I've got a list of 10 or so find-and-replace searches that does close-enough-for-now to what I want it to do.