I have document where the closing quotation mark is preceded by a space. I need to remove that space. However I cannot search for a space followed by the quotation mark and do a global replace, because the opening quotation mark is always preceded by a space.



How can I do the correction using wildcard search and replace?

The document contains too many of these to make manual replacements feasible.

Example:
This is simply a "political agenda ".
Must become:
This is simply a "political agenda".

I also need to mention that the "closing" quotation mark is actually an "opening" quotation mark i.e. a ^0147 rather than a ^0148.
This is simply a ^0147political agenda ^0147.
Must become:
This is simply a ^0147political agenda^0148.

Quite simple. Use an ordinary Find/Replace for:
Find = ^32".
Replace = ".
then
Find = "
Replace = "

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

This does not work for me. The closing quote is not always followed by a full stop. It can be almost anything a space, a comma, a colon, a Questions mark etc.

It shouldn't matter that there's a trailing space after the closing quote. If you want to deal with other punctuation characters, you could use a wildcard Find/Replace where:
Find = [ ^s]"([.,;:\?\!])
Replace = "\1
then:
Find = "
Replace = "

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

This finds nothing, see attached.

Attached Images

Test.jpg (165.3 KB, 17 views)

There are only two reasons it wouldn't find anything:
1. You don't have any content like "political agenda ".; or
2. You didn't check the 'Use wildcards' option.

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