Hi,

I'm trying to clean up a document that was automatically converted to LaTeX. The document contains strings like these:

"(\textit{sahaprat}\textit{ī}\textit{tiniyama}). [Reply:] Not even for the piece of ground and the pot is it like this! However, the fact that, if both exist, there is no restriction of the cognition to [only] one image (\textit{ekar}\textit{ū}\textit{papratī}\textit{tiniyamaviraha}),"

(never mind the meaning )

The idea is to get rid of all the unnecessary instances of \textit{}. So I thought to search for instances of \textit{} that immediately follow one another.

I entered this in the (regexp) search box: \\textit\{(.*?)\}\\textit\{(.*?)\}
and tried replacing it with: \\textit\{$1$2\}

The problem is that the stingy operator ("?") is not stingy enough: apparently the search function looks forward for the second instance of italicization *somewhere* in the document; it doesn't look for instances of *contiguous* italics.

Thus, the regexp also finds:

\textit{some italicized stuff} Oh and here is lots of writing in between! This should not be part of what is found, but it is! \textit{next italicized stuff}.

Somehow I can't bring myself to believe that this is how the regexp should be understood. Or am I barking up the wrong tree?

I also tried a positive lookahead \\textit\{(.*?)\}(?=\\textit\{(.*?)\}), but this produced the same unwanted results.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated,



Thanks in advance,

best regards,