Line breaks at each line in Web text

[ahazelwood]

I have text from the web or Open Office which has a line break at the end of each shortened line. I've read how to remove these. Find & Replace, go to Special and put in line break, which becomes ^l and replace with blank. But the message is always--nothing found. What am I doing wrong?

[Kimberly]

Are you sure there is a line break character at the end of each line... did you turn on Show All to see the non-printing characters?

Are you in a table... when you click in the text, do you have a couple of contextual tabs on the Ribbon... Layout and Design?

[macropod]

Hi ahazelwood,

The ^l is for manual line breaks. You probably need to use ^p, which is for paragraph breaks. Since you probably don't want to join all the 'real' paragraphs together, or risk having words either side of the unwanted paragraph breaks joined together, try the following sequence of four wildcard Find/Replace operations:
Find = ([!^13])([^13])([!^13])
Replace = \1 \3

Find = ([ ])[ ]{1,}
Replace = \1

Find = [^13]{2,}
Replace = ^p

Find = [ ^13]
Replace = ^p

To do a wildcard Find/Replace, you click on the Find/Replace dialog's 'More' button and choose 'use wildcards'.

[ahazelwood]

Thank you very much for your help, but how did you know this? If it was a ^p paragraph break, why couldn't I do it with that? How would regular people know to do this?

[Kimberly]

Originally Posted by ahazelwood

Thank you very much for your help, but how did you know this? If it was a ^p paragraph break, why couldn't I do it with that? How would regular people know to do this?

turn on Show All to see the non-printing characters

[macropod]

Hi ahazelwood,

Originally Posted by ahazelwood

Thank you very much for your help, but how did you know this? If it was a ^p paragraph break, why couldn't I do it with that? How would regular people know to do this?

You could have used the ^p approach, but the solution I posted takes care of web pages where the ^p approach would leave you with words from different lines runtogether and all the logical paragraphs joined together.

I'm just a 'regular people' too! There are other solutions on the web that achieve the same overall result, but some of them are much more complex.