Bulk Edit Selection request

[bunsock]

I would like to be able to use Bulk Edit to reprice items. To do this I would need to be able to select items by "Buy Now" value; using =, > or <. Could this be considered as an enhancement to the Bulk Edit Search please?

[madelaine]

I like this idea

I'd also like "no change Possible" not to be regarded as a "success" on bulk edit.

I still don't know why no change was possible on my most recent bulk edit but by looking at the bulk edit page it was not obvious that this had happened to every single auction.

Does "replace" ever work in a description?

[astral276]

Does "replace" ever work in a description?

Yes, as long as you understand the way it works and its limitations.

If you were to post an actual example of the problem you had then more targeted help may be available.

[madelaine]

item 126956276

for example. I asked it to find "If you buy more than one of my items, please wait for an invoice so I can combine postage costs to save you money (you can post quite a few postcards for one charge!)"

and replace it with "If you buy more than one of my items, please wait for an invoice so I can combine postage costs to save you money"

but the fact that it calls totally failing to do anything "success" is a bit odd, don't you think?

[astral276]

item 126956276

for example. I asked it to find "If you buy more than one of my items, please wait for an invoice so I can combine postage costs to save you money (you can post quite a few postcards for one charge!)" and replace it with "If you buy more than one of my items, please wait for an invoice so I can combine postage costs to save you money"

The likely cause of your problem is whitespace (i.e. spaces and tabs). The Bulk Edit Replace function works at the HTML level. When a browser displays HTML it, unless instructed otherwise by the HTML code, compresses whitespace. This means that several consecutive actual space characters in the HTML code will be displayed by the browser as a single space.

This can cause problems when you are doing a search and replace. What you see on the screen can be something like this (using ^ to indicate a space):

quite^a^few^postcards^for^one^charge

But what is actually in the HTML code can be something like this:

quite^^^^a^few^postcards^^^for^one^^charge

So if you search on the first example as displayed in the browser it is not going to match what is in the HTML code. Hence the Replace will fail.

What is best to do is view the source code of the text you want to replace. I don't know what browser you use so I will describe using Firefox. If you use another browser I'll leave it to you to adapt it or come back for instructions for a specified browser.

• Display a listing containing the text you want to replace
• Highlight that section of text
• Right click on the highlighted text
• Select View Selection Source from the popup menu
• Copy the highlighted text from the resulting display
• Paste that into the Bulk Edit Replace field for the text to be replaced

The text you were trying to replace does have extra spaces that are not displayed by the browser.

You can also have problems if the text you are searching to replace spans more than one line. So best to replace in small chunks. This is the main reason I requested the facility to reuse a previously defined bucket in Bulk Edit. This was recently introduced so makes things easier.

I hope the above is of help. If I have failed to explain anything properly then feel free to ask for clarification.

[madelaine]

Thank you, Mel. I'm puzzled that it didn't even manage to replace the one I cut and pasted the text from but that could be the line feed problem. Will try again!

[madelaine]

P.S. I'd still like "no change Possible" not to be regarded as a "success" on bulk edit. When I look at a bucket and it says it has been successfully processed, I don't usually click through to check and I doubt whether I am alone.