Find and Replace anomaly

[BruceM]

I have used Find and Replace many times to replace extra paragraph marks and
paragraph marks that occur at the end of every line (typical of things copied
from web pages). Now I am in a situation where a government representative
(we are in a regulated industry) wants to see where we keep a particular
regulation for reference. The twist is that the regulation is not available
from the government in printable form, yet the web site's copy is not
considered adequate for our records. That leaves me to copy from the web
site and attempt to make it into a document. I have done this before, but
this one is different. I have replaced all styles with Normal (for now; I
will apply custom styles later), used a macro to remove all hyperlinks, used
Find and Replace to remove all graphics. Here's the problem: I cannot use
Find and Replace to replace a succession of paragraph marks with a single
paragraph mark. I can do it in any other document, but not in this one. If
I copy a succession of two paragraphs from the document to a new document I
get the same result (it doesn't identify the successive paragraphs as being
two paragraphs), but if I add paragraphs to the new document with the Enter
key Find and Replace works as it should. Similarly, when I add empty
paragraphs to the troublesome document I can find them as I would expect. I
have tried a wildcard search (Find ^13{2,}, Replace With ^p), and without
wildcards (Find ^p^p, Replace With ^p). No luck. If I search for a single
paragraph I can find every one, including both in the pair. If I replace
every paragraph mark with, say, a £, then attempt to replace every instance
of ££ with £, same problem as with the paragraphs: it does not recognize it
as a pair.
There is nothing such as a space between the paragraphs. I have removed all
manual formatting, hyperlinks, graphics, etc. In short, everything in the
document is part of the ASCII extended character set. I replaced ^13 with
^p, and ^p with ^p (with and without wildcards respectively). I copied the
entire document to Notepad, then opened that with Word. In every case, same
result.
Anybody have an idea as to what is going on here?

 

[Jay Freedman]

Hi Bruce,

The characters could be manual line breaks instead of paragraph marks. The
Find code is ^l (a lower case ell). Turn on nonprinting character display
and check the line ends. A manual break looks like a left-pointing arrow
with a hooked tail.

See http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/CleanWebText.htm for more help.

 

[lostinspace]

----- Original Message -----
From: "BruceM" <>
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.word.docmanagement
Sent: Monday, January 17, 2005 11:43 AM
Subject: Find and Replace anomaly

I have used Find and Replace many times to replace extra paragraph marks
and
paragraph marks that occur at the end of every line (typical of things
copied
from web pages). Now I am in a situation where a government
representative
(we are in a regulated industry) wants to see where we keep a particular
regulation for reference. The twist is that the regulation is not
available
from the government in printable form, yet the web site's copy is not
considered adequate for our records. That leaves me to copy from the web
site and attempt to make it into a document. I have done this before, but
this one is different. I have replaced all styles with Normal (for now; I
will apply custom styles later), used a macro to remove all hyperlinks,
used
Find and Replace to remove all graphics. Here's the problem: I cannot
use
Find and Replace to replace a succession of paragraph marks with a single
paragraph mark. I can do it in any other document, but not in this one.
If
I copy a succession of two paragraphs from the document to a new document
I
get the same result (it doesn't identify the successive paragraphs as
being
two paragraphs), but if I add paragraphs to the new document with the
Enter
key Find and Replace works as it should. Similarly, when I add empty
paragraphs to the troublesome document I can find them as I would expect.
I
have tried a wildcard search (Find ^13{2,}, Replace With ^p), and without
wildcards (Find ^p^p, Replace With ^p). No luck. If I search for a
single
paragraph I can find every one, including both in the pair. If I replace
every paragraph mark with, say, a £, then attempt to replace every
instance
of ££ with £, same problem as with the paragraphs: it does not recognize
it
as a pair.
There is nothing such as a space between the paragraphs. I have removed
all
manual formatting, hyperlinks, graphics, etc. In short, everything in the
document is part of the ASCII extended character set. I replaced ^13 with
^p, and ^p with ^p (with and without wildcards respectively). I copied
the
entire document to Notepad, then opened that with Word. In every case,
same
result.
Anybody have an idea as to what is going on here?

Bruce,
Likely the best service you could do in assiting yourself would
be in providing the URL for the page your attempting to convert?

CSS and html have formatting options which display spacing and such beyond
Word's formatting options.

One alternative option may be to print the web page to a PDF file retaning
all formatting in the process.

 

[BruceM]

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I guess I should have mentioned I
displayed nonprinting characters. I finally figured out what it was (sort
of). At any rate I made the problem go away. Scattered throughout the
document was a sort of right angle arrow pointing up (a graphic, not a line
break) followed by the word "top" as a hyperlink followed by a paragraph
mark. I used ^g to get rid of the graphics, then replaced "top" in hyperlink
character style with "top" in Normal style, then I replaced top^p with
nothing. It was the paragraph mark after the hyperlink that went weird on me.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Could it have been a text-wrapping break? They look a lot like line breaks,
and AFAIK there is no way to search for them using Find.

 

[BruceM]

No, not text-wrapping. What was so strange was that no matter what character
I substituted for the paragraphs marks, Find could not locate the one that
was originally on the line with the hyperlink.

 

[Martin P]

One way to get hold of these unidentifiable characters is to get an
exhaustive list of what they are not, together with the the exclamation mark,
such as [!A-Za-z0-9]. It is not difficult to create an exhaustive list. In
a duplicate document, get rid of characters until almost nothing remains.
Start off with, say, [A-Za-z0-9], change that to nothing and add characters
that remain. Once you have the list, add the exclamation mark and use that
in the original document..