find/remove duplicates

[hephalumph]

I have a large (3Million+ word) document I converted from RTF into a Word Doc.

At the start of many (maybe most) sections, the section title is repeated for some reason.

So it has something like:

Section 1: How to do something

Section 1: How to do something

Paragraphs on how to do something.

Section 2: More details.

Section 2: More details.



Paragraphs of more details

and so on.

I already figured out how to do a case-sensitive find/replace on "Section" and not replace the text but to make the style of those lines all Heading 1 - which formatted them and added them to the navigation pane at the same time. Which was awesome!

Now I am hoping there is some way that I can ferret out all of the duplicate section headings and remove the extras.

I found if I right-click the title in the navigation pane I can delete it from there (and learned to make sure it was the first of the duplicates, as the second would delete the doubled title PLUS all of the contents in that section!).

But with nearly 5,000 sections total, and close to (or maybe more than) half of them duplicated, this would be a long process.

Is there any way to go through and do this with some variation of a find/replace?

[macropod]

You could use a wildcard Find/Replace, where:
Find = (Section [0-9][!^13]@^13)\1
Replace = \1

[hephalumph]

Awesome, thanks! I knew there had to be a way.
Would you mind explaining to me what the various terms are there? Specifically, the !^13, @^13, and \1?

(Also, since it goes up into the thousands, would I need to change [0-9] to [0-999], or would the [0-9] cover any/all numbers?)

[macropod]

The [!^13]@^13 Find expression tells Word to find any string of characters, other than a paragraph break, terminated by a paragraph break.

The \1 Find expression tells Word to find exactly the same string as that found by the expression between the ().

It doesn't matter to the Find what character follows the first digit, provided it's not a paragraph break. Hence numbers 0-9999999... would be found.

[hephalumph]

So would
Find = (Section [!^13]@^13)\1
Replace = \1

Also work?

[hephalumph]

Hmm, word found no results with that search string. I used, exactly,
Find = (Section [0-9][!^13]@^13)\1
Replace = \1

And even though I had one of the repeated section headings visible on screen, it reported that no results were found.

[macropod]

Not if you require 'Section' to be followed by a number and not a letter.

[hephalumph]

Would it matter that they are styled as Heading 1, and in the navigation pane? I wouldn't think it would matter, but...?

[macropod]

Did you check the 'use wildcards' option?

[hephalumph]

Originally Posted by macropod

Did you check the 'use wildcards' option?

Of course I hadn't, lol. Thanks again! Worked a treat!