<Sigh> I wish I did!! Apologies for all the confusion. But a least it was an example of what a tangle you can get yourself into with careless and poorly thought through wildcard searches.

I'l now go stand in the corner until the end of class.

And whilst I was doing that I came up with the idea of following up the search and replace using ]^w[ with a second one using just ][ to catch any cases where there is no white space between the ] and [ of interest