Find and replace issue

[nrsmd]

I want to be able to delete hundreds of hyperlinks that I needed for my print on demand soft cover book but don't want for my e-book.



They look like:

(http://cccccc) or (http:// xxxxxxxxxxxx)

So the internal portion varies as to the number of characters.

Can I do a simple find and replace (with a delete) to cover all possibilities?

I was wondering about a wild card but have no idea how I would do that.

[Robert2]

Do the following Find/Replace operation with the “Use wildcards” option checked:

Find What: \(http://[!^13]*\)
Replace With: clear box

Note that the above regex pattern will not catch URLs beginning with “https”. If you have any of these in your document, use the following Find/Replace (still with wildcards ON):

Find What: \(https://[!^13]*\)
Replace With: clear box

[nrsmd]

That is tremendous,,,magic,,,, and does exactly what I asked for. I added a space before the first \ so that my period at the end would tighten to the word.

I tried to analyze why it works, but it's beyond my pay grade for sure.

Thank you

[Robert2]

The backslash before “(“ and “)” is there to “escape” the opening and closing brackets, i.e. to make them recognized as ordinary characters. Otherwise, Word would consider that the brackets define a regex “group” for back-reference.

“http://” searches for itself as a string of characters.

“[!^13]*” matches anything that is not a paragraph end mark.

Note that “\(http://*\)” or “\(https://*\)” would have done the job more simply!