Text to read and ignore

Text to read and ignore

Choose Ignore on the Text Menu if you wish to specify that only parts of your source text are to be read.

Skip Markers

Skip markers are symbols or characters or strings used in the input text which enclose text to be ignored. If any skip markers are defined here, all text between them will be ignored when analysing the input files. You can define up to five different pairs of skip markers. If you define an opening skip marker, you must define its closing counterpart. The maximum length of a skip marker is ten characters.

You can use skip markers to add notes or comments to your source text which need not form part of the concordance. They are also useful for temporarily 'commenting out' parts of the text so that the concordance includes only a selection of the text. This is easier than having to prepare a new version of the source text.

Example: If your text contains this line:

New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large {Trin. MS: writ at large}

and if you define the characters { and } as a pair of skip markers, then the comment at the end of the line enclosed in curly brackets will be ignored when making the concordance.

Selecting by position on line

You can also choose to have Concordance read text from selected positions (columns) on each line of the source text. For example, if a source text has been prepared with line numbers in the left margin, you can skip them.

If you want to start reading text from (say) column 3 and continue right to the end of the line, enter 3 for the start column and 0 (or any very large number) for the end column.

Example: Making a concordance to an HTML file

You can make a concordance to the text in an HTML file without having to convert it to plain text first. Just define the characters < and > as a pair of skip markers. The effect will be to skip all HTML markup in the file, leaving only the text, since HTML markup encloses tags like this: <tag>

This removes only HTML markup. You can also translate HTML special characters such as é (which is HTML for the letter e with an acute accent) into Windows characters: see Converting HTML entities.

See also:
Preparing text
Saving and restoring settings

Other related topics