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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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[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

If you want to go down the regex route, I highly recommend Melody

You can click on one of the playground examples on the page, then modify it to your needs. It will spit out regex for, but it's much more readable and has a smoother learning curve

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

Bookmarked! Yeah whichever option is the absolute most idiot-proof is the one I might stand a chance with. I'm surface-level computer literate, but never got into any coding... other than MySpace back when it was HTML and some Excel formula shenanigans.

We're days away from the next semester of nursing school kicking off, so I don't think diving into full regex would be feasible for me at this point. I'm tinkering with MS Word find/replace wildcards and have a nice list of commands going. Prof already assigned us 8 chapters of reading to be completed BY day 1, and I just stacked em all up in one doc and obliterated an insane amount of nonsense in like 30 mins (not including the several days of cobbling the commands together, but they're on standby for instant use now!).

I don't think it'll be any problem to hit entire textbooks from here out, so hell yeah!

Anyway, MS Word wildcards seem like a good start to dip my feet in now. Once the semester is done and I have some free time again, a real dive into regex is the next project!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

In that case, if wildcards aren't enough I'd use an LLM - chat gpt or llama can handle simple regex, and you can just try it out and see if it worked right

Honestly, as a programmer, I'd advise you to learn Python or JavaScript before diving into regex. If you could mess with html without guidance, you've passed the big gap that separates people who can code from those who can't - your eyes didn't glaze over when you looked at something you didn't understand. Writing a script to do custom string replacements isn't hard, it's less efficient but it'll stick with you in a way that regex won't

I use regex when I need speed, but it's a very powerful one trick pony - the problem is it's extremely dense

You can write code that follows your thoughts, you write regex that matches your intentions