I have a GROUP of LARGE documents that were improperly formatted so they contain paragraph breaks in random places where they should not. I have figured out that almost all of them occur where there is a lower case letter preceeding the error. So searching for [a-z]^13 finds them. But replacing the paragraph character with a space also deletes the preceeding character, so that doesn’t help. I need a way to find and replace only the paragraph character without deleting the preceeding (correct) character.
If I could FIND, move forward one character and then replace, that should work. I don’t know how to do that except manually, and that would take months.
Any ideas?


Thank you.
JP91306

Try, for example, a wildcard Find/Replace with:
Find = ([a-z,])^13
Replace = \1^32
You may also be interested in some of the concepts explored in the 'Cleaning up Text Pasted from Websites, E-mails, PDFs etc.' thread at the top of this forum (https://www.msofficeforums.com/word/...s-e-mails.html).

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

That ALMOST works. It does remove the PARAGRAPH mark, but it ALSO adds a space before the "final" letter in the word that precedes the PARAGRAPH mark. . so... [word][paragraph char] becomes [wor d] . ...so that doesn't quite work. I don't understand some of the code so I couldn't guess how to fix it. Thanks, jp

Unless you inserted a space before the \1 in the Replace expression, that wouldn't happen. The ^32 inserts a space where the paragraph break was.

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