Find and replace all blanks with underscore characters in Windows 7 dialogs, or PDF form dialog

Question

Within Windows 7, I use utilities such as PDFCreator; I would like to locate a keyboard shortcut utility to find all instances of a character (e.g a blank) in a single line dialog form and replace all of these with a different character (e.g. an underscore).

Does anyone know if there is a keyboard shortcut or other Windows 7 OS level utility that can do this?

I ask about a Windows 7 keyboard shortcut because I need this capability most when I am NOT inside a dedicated application like Word or Excel.

Answer 1

A python script seems like the best way of doing something like this without using an application like Word or even Notepad.

If you did that you could drop a bunch of files to it and just have it replace all " " spaces that do not occur between two words with "_".

If you want something that you can use with just a keystroke (I'm imagining that you want to be able to open something in PDFCreator, see that it needs to be fixed, hit a key combo and it would close PDFCreator, fix the file and reopen PDFCreator), maybe a custom keyboard shortcut like Colibri could automate that for you.

Answer 2

Use AutoHotkey and do it exactly like you said

1. SendKey Pos1 to jump to the front
2. Senkey Shift+End to jump to the end of the line and select all
3. Sendkey CTRL+X to cut everything
4. Modify the Clipboard with .Replace in Autohotkey
5. Sendkey CTRL+V to paste the modified string back

You can trigger this script with a global hotkey, should work