Hi Dean,
You can list as many characters as you like within the square brackets. If
any of them are "special" wildcards as described in Graham's article, they
have to be preceded by a backslash to say you're searching for the actual
character and not things that match the wildcard; in your case, only the
question mark is in that class. So the search term would be
([!\?.:])^13
to ignore any question mark followed by a paragraph mark, any period
followed by a paragraph mark, or any colon followed by a paragraph mark.
I can't quite tell from your question whether you also want to ignore
question marks and colons that are *not* followed by a paragraph mark. I
don't think that can be combined with the previous search term in one
expression.
DeanH wrote:
Hi Jay.
I use this find formula all the time but I wonder if you can help
with an extention of this wildcard use.
How can I get this to not just to ignore Periods (Full Stop)
immediately followed by paragraph mark, but also Question Marks and
Colons at the same time?
Many thanks for your assistance.
DeanH
"Idaho Word Man" wrote:
Thanks. You've just opened up a new world of possibilities for me.
"Jay Freedman" wrote:
Turn on wildcard searching and use the search term
([!.])^13
and the replacement term
\1.^p
The expression [!.] means "any character that isn't a period". See
http://www.gmayor.com/replace_using_wildcards.htm.
--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so all may benefit.
Idaho Word Man wrote:
I have a very large document (currently 644 pages) that was written
by a flatulent weasel who thinks punctuation is only for liberal
arts majors and other wimps. One of his very common errors is to
omit periods at the end of paragraphs.
Is there any way to search for "*^p" where * stands for any
character BUT a period? If I could systematically search for all
paragraphs that end with anything but a period I could make sure I
don't miss any instances of this error. (I've already deleted
Space^p and Space-Space^p.)
I'm still using Word 2003 on XP Professional.
Thanks,
Fred