I have two long documents, with many footnotes, that need to be formatted. Both documents present a different problem in the footnotes, which I would like to solve using a regular expression.

1. Punctuation sign (full stop) missing at the end of a footnote.
I use the following regular expression:
find (search all footnotes that do not end with a punctuation sign), use wildcards activated: ([!.\?\!])(^13)(^2)
replace (add full stop at the end of footnotes not ending with a punctuation sign): \1.\2\3


The regular expression finds the footnotes that should be corrected without any problems, but does not do anything when pressing 'replace', nor 'replace all'.

2. Footnotes separated by a white line, i.e. additional hard return.
I use the following regular expression:
find (search all footnotes that are separated from the next one by an additional hard return), use wildcards activated: (^13)(^13)(^2)
replace (remove one of both hard returns): \2\3
The regular expression, again, finds the footnotes that should be corrected without any problems, but does not do anything when pressing 'replace', nor 'replace all'.

I have the impression the paragraph mark is blocking both regular expressions (looks like Word is thinking I am replacing the paragraph mark at the end of the footnote, which is not allowed). Can anyone confirm this idea and offer some help how to solve it?

Thanks in advance!

For 1:
Unless your footnotes have paragraphs that shouldn't terminate in a punctuation mark, you should be able to use -
Find = ([!.\?\!])(^13)
Replace = \1.\2

For 2:
For empty footnote paragraphs, except where the footnote ends with an empty paragraph, you should be able to use -
Find = (^13){2,}
Replace = ^p

Because you can't replace the final paragraph break in a footnote or endnote, there is a limit to what can be achieved via Find/Replace. A macro, however, could be used to iterate through each footnote and do the required processing.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Hi! I'm trying to accomplish #2 (replacing ^p^p with ^p in footnotes) but I'm at a loss because matches are found and clicking the "Find next" button does take me to the next occurrence, but replacing fails with no apparent error message.
I've tried both with and without wildcards, using either ^13^13 or ^p^p in the "Find" field, but to no avail.
Also, writing it as VBA code gave no different result.
As I found out here, the only thing that works is put my cursor at the start of the paragraph I want to delete and then press the Backspace key instead of the Delete key. But since my goal is coding all this, how does that translate to VBA?
This post is supposed to solve it, but it hasn't worked for me and I don't understand why because I'm still pretty new to VBA coding.
Thank you!

Oh, it did work! I just had to fix a couple of things that weren't pasted properly from the webpage!! Thank you, solved for me (the original poster did not follow up)!
Copying/pasting here the code that worked. All credit goes to How to fix “This is not a valid action for footnotes” MS Word Error