In my opinion, you are going about this the wrong way.



Try using the 'Autoformat...' button that you can add to your Quick Access Toolbar. This makes short work of what you are trying to achieve.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Thanks for your suggestion Andrew. Auto-format can probably be very useful but I doubt that it has the flexibility of knowing how to use find and replace properly. It (find and replace) is an amazing tool and I'd like to be able to use it to it's full potential (or somewhere close to it).

The Wiki articles sub-headings is really only one of numerous similar problems that I often encounter while trying to manipulate documents, so if I could find the answer to this question (if there is an answer), then it would answer a number of other problems I have as well, whereas I think auto-format would be a bit one-dimensional by comparison.

It's the asterisk that is both so useful and at the same time causes so many problems.

For example, I often want to use a quotation as a dividing marker in my "Find" searches. If i want to italicise all quotes it works great: Find: "*" and Replace with: Italics. If i click "Find next" it will skip from one quotation to another perfectly. But if introduce anything else into the "Find", then things can get messy. E.g. the quotes are often followed by a bracketed reference for the quote, but if I try to include the reference in my search then the "*" starts finding lots of text I don't want it to find. It no longer limits itself to one quote and instead starts selecting numerous quotes including lots of unquoted text in between.

I've tried using "*"{1} to limit it to one quote, and also things like "{1}*" hoping that it would limit itself to only one 'open speech marks', but of course the asterisk overrides any limits I try to impose.

I have had some success with codes like the following:
([A-Za-z ,.;:’\?\!\-”]{10,200})
It will select most characters except "open speech marks" (between 10 and 200 characters as you can see), which of course has the effect of (usually) limiting the search to one quotation (minus the "open speech marks" which ideally would be included). That then often requires some extra fixing up afterwards which i was hoping I could avoid if I could find some way to "tame" the asterisk.

Sorry to take up your time. But if you have any suggestions I'd be happy to hear them. I suspect knowing how to write macros would help a lot, but i also suspect that would take quite some effort.

Thanks again

In case anyone else has a similar problem to the bolding of the Wikipedia subheadings - here's a code that will take care of almost all of them and remove the "[edit]":

Find: ([A-Za-z ,.;:’\?0-9\!\-”\(\)]{3,200})(\[edit\])
Replace: ^13\1
(Bold)

I added a paragraph mark because many of the subheadings don't have one before them when you paste the article in plain text. But some of them do, in which case you'll sometimes have 3 paragraph marks when you only want two. So to reduce them to two, and unbold them, and change all the ^13 to proper paragraph marks (^p) that don't cause any issues, use:

Find:^13^13^13
Replace:^p^p
(Not Bold)

So that's the Wikipedia problem pretty much sorted. But like I said in the previous post - this wasn't really about Wikipedia articles anyway, it's more about finding a way to limit the asterisk which causes me so many other problems. If anyone can answer that I'd be glad.

Edit: In case anyone's wondering why I didn't use this before - I had been trying to limit the selection to the subheading by using the paragraph mark that comes before it, but know I've realised that by not using the asterisk the selection won't go beyond/before the beginning of the sub-heading. The asterisk of course includes all characters including paragraph marks, which is why it was selecting lots of text that preceded the subheading.

...We're all still learning. Sigh.