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Three Lefts Three Lefts is offline
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Default Paste (Ctrl-V) into Find and Replace Panel

On Wed, 06 Aug 2008 07:15:38 -0700, Three Lefts
wrote:

From time to time, I have a need to edit out special characters from a
document. These documents may have come from various sources and they
contain all kinds of ASCII characters (tabs, carriage returns, and
other kinds of control characters (X'00', etc.).

I know I can replace some special characters, like tabs and carriage
returns, by using the "^x" codes. But why won't Word allow me to paste
the actual characters into the "Find what:" field?

Let's say I have a document containing several hundred lines that look
like this. The "?" represent various ASCII special characters, not all
the same.

?M01??
?
?Some text I want to keep?
?M02??
?
?Some text I want to keep?
?M03??
?
?Some text I want to keep?

and so on.

It would be so helpful to be able to select the text following the
"M01" up to the "Some text..." including the carriage returns, paste
that into the "Find what:" field, and put the new text in the "Replace
with:" field, and click on Replace all.

Is there any way to get this done without manually editing each line?


PS: In case this was not clear, I meant to say that the objective is
to convert the original text:

?M01??
?
?Some text I want to keep?
?M02??
?
?Some text I want to keep?
?M03??
?
?Some text I want to keep?
....

into something like this:

M01 Some text I want to keep
M02 Some text I want to keep
M03 Some text I want to keep
....