Odd tags spread throughout topics

[ccardimon]

I am getting the tags <b></b> and <span></span> spread throughout my topics.

I think this happened in older projects after upgrading from Flare 4 to Flare 5.

I tried a simple search and replace, but no joy. Is there another way to delete all these empty tags from projects, other than manually?

[forfear]

Do a find and replace
be sure to search in code

and repeat find and replace each time with the following find entry

<span></span>

and


<b></b>


that should be about it

[ccardimon]

What do you mean by "be sure to search in code" -- ?

[LTinker68]

He meant make sure you checked the option to search in source code. It's a field located lower on the find and replace pane.

However, that find and replace will only work if you have empty tags. That is <b> immediately followed by </b> without anything between them. Is that your situation, or are you saying you have those bold tags surrounding text and you want to get rid of the tags and leave the text behind?

[ccardimon]

My tags look exactly like this: <p></p> and <b></b> and <span></span>.

Right out there in the middle of everything and they do not contain text.

[ccardimon]

Cool. Thanks. That seems to have worked.

But why in the world would such tags suddenly show up where they had not appeared before?

[KevinDAmery]

Well, <p></p> will happen if you hit enter twice in a row. The others look like someone tried to format a single space or something. Which sounds like an odd thing to do... Were these topics imported from Word by any chance? If they came from documents that were edited by pointy-haired-boss type people you could have all sorts of wacky inline formatting in the Word docs, and Flare would create tags that correspond to that formatting.

[ccardimon]

Were these topics imported from Word by any chance?

Yup.

[NorthEast]

Cool. Thanks. That seems to have worked.

But why in the world would such tags suddenly show up where they had not appeared before?

It's a new feature in v5 to show empty tags in the editor.
They will have always been there, you just wouldn't have noticed them before.

Empty paragraph tags have almost certainly come from an import, as you can't create an empty p tag in the Flare editor (as it puts in a   - space).
Even in projects that aren't imported you might find empty bold or span tags, as it's easy to delete a word without deleting the surrounding tags.

[ccardimon]

It's a new feature in v5 to show empty tags in the editor.
They will have always been there, you just wouldn't have noticed them before.

That's one less mystery. Do empty tags cause harm? If not, why is making them visible a new feature?

[NorthEast]

They shouldn't cause any real harm, it's just a way of showing up debris that was previously very easy to miss in the editor.

[ccardimon]

Don't supposed there's a Remove Empty Tags function anywhere, is there?

[LTinker68]

I put in that request because I somehow got some empty xref tags in a few topics, so my output showed "...see page 23see page 1". The empty xref tag resulted in the second "see page 1".

Make sure you submit your own request, though, at http://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx.

[ccardimon]

Make sure you submit your own request, though.

Done.