Split Clips

The Split Clips button is available on the collection toolbar when the ClipHistory tab or an AceText Collection tab is active.

Click the Split Clips button on the collection toolbar to split one or more clips into multiple clips.

When you click the Split Clips button, you will be asked which characters AceText should interpret as delimiters in the original clips. A delimiter can be a single character or a string of characters. Those delimiters will be deleted, and the bits of text between them will be stored in new clips. E.g. to split a clip holding a comma-delimited list of items, select the comma as the delimiter. AceText will then create a new clip for each item in the comma-delimited list.

To split more complicated clips, you can use a regular expression. AceText can apply the regular expression in two ways. If you select the “split” option, AceText deletes each regular expression match. The bits of text between two matches (as well as the bits before the first and after the last match) are stored in new clips. Splitting along the regular expression [;,], for example, treats both semicolons and commas as delimiters.

If you select the regular expression “match” option, AceText finds all regex matches in the clip and stores each match into a new clip. Parts of the original clip not matched by the regular expression are discarded. Splitting a clip matching the regular expression \w+, for example, extracts all the words from the clip, putting each word into a new clip. Punctuation and whitespace are discarded.

You can also choose how to add the split clips to the collection. If you select “replace the original clips” then each clip that you selected is replaced with the clips that it was split into. The other two options leave the original clips in place and insert the clips that are split from each clip above or below the original clips.

Click the downward pointing arrow next to the Split Clips button to quickly split clips using one of the common delimiters. Doing so always replaces the original clips with the split clips.

See Manage and Arrange Text to learn how to use AceText.