Bulk Edit Item Description Find & Replace Newline Character

[mtgeternalking]

I made what was to me a simple find and replace edit using the Bulk Edit tool via the Item Description "Find & Replace". However, a superfluous newline character suddenly showed up in the middle of a paragraph where one wasn't present before. I am trying to remove that superfluous newline character and the following is what I tried:

1) Copying the portion of the two words with that undesired newline character between them and putting it in the Find box, and then putting that same string typed in with just an appropriate space between the two words. That did not work.

2) Using the "Inspect" feature on Chrome as directed by a Knowledge Base post here to copy the HTML element that was automatically highlighted and trying to edit that HTML piece. That also did not work.

3) Manually editing one description to see what the element would like after the fact. Upon contrasting the correct description structure to the wrong one, the desired one has a <span> tag surrounding the affected section of text whereas the incorrect description has <div> tags surrounding that same section of text. See below for the minimum working example:

Correct:

<span style="font-family: Arial;">Otherwise, first class shipping needs to be selected for your combined order at which point up to 16 oz can be shipped&nbsp;</span>
<font face="Arial">together in a single package. If you believe that your desired full order could be split into two&nbsp;</font>

Incorrect:

<div style="font-size: large;">Otherwise, first class shipping needs to be selected for your combined order at which point up to 16 oz can be shipped&nbsp;</div>
<font face="Arial">together in a single package. If you believe that your desired full order could be split into two&nbsp;</font>

But even after attempting to replace that undesired element with the desirable one, nothing changed.

If anyone can advise how to make what I hoped would be a simple 10 second edit, I'd be greatly appreciative.

[mtgeternalking]

I found a solution but it requires three HTML find and replace executions.

1) Changed the <div> tagged block to <span> tagged block as described in attempt 3) above.

2) Changed the new HTML structure covering the section,

shipped&nbsp;</span>
<div style="font-size: large;"><font face="Arial">together

to replace it with "shipped together". Note that the HTML content has a newline character in the coding structure. This replacement reproduces the same HTML structure as above sans the newline.

3) Repeat the above but with the new HTML structure,

shipped&nbsp;</span><div style="font-size: large;"><font face="Arial">together

to replace it with "shipped together". Note that prior to this last change as mentioned in the previous step the newline character is absent in the HTML code structure. It finally replaces all that HTML gunk with just a standard space as desired.

I am not at all well-versed in HTML and how it affects find and replace tools embedded in a client such as eBay, but hopefully this solution might offer others with a similar situation a starting point to editing their item descriptions when special formatting or characters carried behind the scenes in the HTML needs to be edited.

However, for those who are more expert with this eBay tool or HTML interaction with such a tool and know how to do this in one fell swoop, please do share.

[shipscript]

I assume the issue was that there was a visual break in your listing, not necessarily a newline character in the code.

The visual break occurred when something was removed that left some unmatched pairs of HTML code, so the editor repaired the code by inserting the matching HTML that closed the pairing, and created a visual break in doing so.  In your case, a div (which is a new section, or hard break) replaced the span, which is inline and is not a visual break.

Your solution is probably the best for your problem, since eBay's find-replace doesn't allow wildcards.

Before performing a find-replace, the underlying HTML should be examined. The code that is attached to the text during removal must be replaced to keep the code pairs balanced, unless matching pairs can be removed with the text.

HTML pairs typically have an opener and a closer. The matching closer always starts with a "/".

So <div> must match a </div> and a <span> must match a </span>, and the pairs must be nested, not interleaved.

To close two paragraphs :

<div> Something here </div>

<div> and something here.</div>

You could clip out the code pair in the middle and leave the outer pair:

<div> Something here

and something here.</div>

And the visual line break created by the code would disappear.

This, on the other hand is made of two different types of elements:

<div> Something here </div>

<span> and something here.</span>

There is no easy way to combine the two without looking at the full code surrounding both. So, the two would need to be combined under one element. One possibility is to move the closing tag so that the matching code pairs are nested :

<div> Something here

<span> and something here.</span></div>

or just recode to one pair, like this :

<div> Something here

 and something here.</div>