Hi,

Is there a way to do a wildcard search for paragraphs that only contain a single word?

A word that's any number of characters in length (not necessarily alphanumeric, could also include special characters) just as long as there's no spaces between them.



Anyone know?

Thanks!

Click "Find in Main Document" after entering the following wildcard search:
[!^13]@

Hi Robert, thanks for replying.

This didn't seem to work for me, though. When I ran it as "Find in Main Document" it hung/crashed Word, so I tried it as a 'Find Next' wildcard search and it found whole paragraphs (multiples words including spaces), with each subsequent 'Find Next' selecting the same text with one character fewer than before.

Most of the info I've found on wildcard syntax is a bit vague about how to include whitespace as part of the criteria, which I'm guessing is needed to identify whole words.

It is working in Word 2019.
[!^13] is searching for anything that is not a paragraph end mark. That includes space characters.

Yes, that's the problem. I only want paragraphs that contain ONE word, but because it's including spaces it's including multiple words.

What if you find this
"^13[A-Za-z]{1,}^13"

or
"^13[A-Za-z0-9]{1,}^13"

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Thanks for reply Guessed.

That syntax only works where there are no special characters, so if the word is in quotes, for example, it doesn't get picked up.

What I need is a way to include special characters (but not spaces!) in this part of the syntax: "[A-Za-z0-9]". Or a way to exclude spaces, in the same way that this syntax excludes paragraph marks: "[!^13]"

OK try searching for this with wildcards
^13[! ]@^13

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia