Anyone know of a plugin or plugins that will do Search and Replace on layer and/or component names?

[DanRathbun]

@john_mcclenahan

change F0 to F00, F1 to F01, etc everywhere it occurs in the layers window, or the component browser.

Class: String (Ruby 2.2.4)

if layer.name.start_with?('F','f')
  # Replace starting F or f with F0:
  layer.name= layer.name.gsub(/\A(F|f)/,'F0')
end

…OR…

if instance.name.start_with?('F','f')
  # Replace starting F or f with F0:
  instance.name= instance.name.gsub(/\A(F|f)/,'F0')
end

However, regular expressions also have a case-insensitive “i” switch
(switches are placed just following the closing / of the expression.)
This can shorten the expression from: /\A(F|f)/, to: /\Af/i,
which is read as “case-insensitive match any f character at start of string”
Example:

if layer.name.start_with?('F','f')
  # Replace starting F or f with F0:
  layer.name= layer.name.gsub(/\Af/i,'F0')
end

Ruby versions prior to 2.x (SketchUp 2014 and earlier,) did not have the String#start_with?() method
so (for older SketchUp support) you may need to also use a regular expression match in the if:

if layer.name =~ /\Af/i
  # Replace starting F or f with F0:
  layer.name= layer.name.gsub(/\Af/i,'F0')
end

http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.2.4/doc/regexp_rdoc.html
http://ruby-doc.com/docs/ProgrammingRuby/html/intro.html#S5
http://ruby-doc.com/docs/ProgrammingRuby/html/language.html#UJ

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@john_mcclenahan

And check and change name capitalization for consistency.

# Split the string at word boundaries, iterate the array capitalizing 
# members that can be recognized as words with ASCII characters,
# and stitch the array back together assigning it back to the object:
lname= lname.split(/\b/).each{|s|s.capitalize!}.join

Class: String (Ruby 2.2.4)

Class: Array (Ruby 2.2.4)

Class: String (Ruby 2.2.4)

Class: Array (Ruby 2.2.4)

@john_mcclenahan

What we need is an equivalent of a case-sensitive Search and Replace as in a word processor …

Ruby’s String capitalize methods will only cap lowercase characters within the ASCII set. So it’s just easier to let Ruby’s C side code handle this. (Much faster than Ruby-side string comparison in a conditional expression.)

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I posted several code examples in a “Find components by name” thread, one for components, the other for groups:

Selecting Specific Entity, Group or Component (By Name)

See: Sketchup::DefinitionList.[] Because you are asking about filtering and searching, (and the API docs do not actually say so,…) I’ll assume you do not know that most SketchUp API collection classes mix in the Ruby Enumerable library. So say that wasn’t exactly the definition name that you wanted to find, but one of a certain definition’s instances. Using the definition list subscript method, you get the definition reference, then use one of the Enumerable search methods to find the exact …

Selecting Specific Entity, Group or Component (By Name)

Very similar for groups, because groups are disguised components. That means they have definitions. And their definitions have a separate name attribute, than the group instances. But there are a few quirks. The group.description method is an wrapper for group.definition.description. (So like a component instance, they share their definition’s description attribute.) So to find groups through the definition list, we need to filter out the definitions for images and normal components. dlist …