The point of this story basically is that I’m an idiot and Regular Expressions are awesome. Maybe this little tip can save your day too.
My proofreader for my MA thesis pointed out that plural marking of acronyms should be with an apostrophe before the ‘s’. I use the acronym LO for “Learning Object” a lot. So I made a search/replace from “LOs” to “LO’s”, clicking “Replace all” without ticking “Match case” or “Whole words only” in NeoOffice. Of course, there’s a lot of words containing “los”. So, I’m an idiot, which I found out the day after when stumbling upon the word “gLO’ss”.
But, everbody stand back. I know Regular Expressions.
So, I did a new search/replace: “([a-z])lo’s” with “$1los” and “lo’s([a-z])” with “los$1″ (this time – once bitten, twice shy – not clicking “Replace all”, which wouldn’t have done any harm though).
Thank you, Regular Expressions!