Find in register does something funny with spaces

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pls'
pls' Member ✭✭

I have a payee with many transactions whose name was accidently entered incorrect. In particular, instead of one space between 2 words there are 2. Of course, this mistake ended up in Memorized Transactions and so was replicated across all such payments.

I'm trying to use Find to locate the transactions with double spaces. I have tried (using ~ for a space)
A~~ using Starts With
A~~B using Starts With with B being a partial name
A~~B using Exact with B being the full name

All of these fail in the same way: they find instances with both a single and double space instad of only finding instances with a double space.

Could someone please tell me exactly what Quicken is doing with spaces in Find? And is there a way to only find payees where the name has a double space?

Thanks
++PLS

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Best Answer

  • Jim_Harman
    Jim_Harman SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
    Answer ✓
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    The normal wildcard for one character would be "?", but apparently when finding, Quicken is treating any whitespace as one space.

    The first thing to do if you have not already would be to correct the Memorized Payee List so that the Payee only has one space.

    Then unless there is something else unique about the Payee that you want to keep, you could do a find and replace for the full Payee name with one space, replacing it with the one-space version. That will do a bunch of unnecessary replacing, but it should change all the 2-space Payees to single spaces in the process.

    Of course you should always back up your data before making any bulk changes.

    QWin Premier subscription

Answers

  • Jim_Harman
    Jim_Harman SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
    Answer ✓
    Options

    The normal wildcard for one character would be "?", but apparently when finding, Quicken is treating any whitespace as one space.

    The first thing to do if you have not already would be to correct the Memorized Payee List so that the Payee only has one space.

    Then unless there is something else unique about the Payee that you want to keep, you could do a find and replace for the full Payee name with one space, replacing it with the one-space version. That will do a bunch of unnecessary replacing, but it should change all the 2-space Payees to single spaces in the process.

    Of course you should always back up your data before making any bulk changes.

    QWin Premier subscription
  • pls'
    pls' Member ✭✭
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    Thanks, that worked fine.

    One further question. I remember seeing a table showing all the special characters that can be used in find, somewhere on the Quicken web site. I am unable to find it again. Do you know here it is?

  • Rocket J Squirrel
    Rocket J Squirrel SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
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    Quicken user since version 2 for DOS, now using QWin Biz & Personal Subscription (US) on Win10 Pro.

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