[Paul]

I think it might help to clarify what it means to 'catch the word
"wouldest" in a multiword selection'. Selection means something very
specific in windows environments. Do you mean instead that you want
to match all instances of "wouldest" occuring within a specific
pattern of words? A few simple examples would help.

On Jun 15, 8:26*am, Jay Freedman wrote:
Sorry, you don't have it right. The [! ] in that expression means only
that the single character preceding "dest" must not be a space; but it
doesn't restrict any of the characters that come before that. The real
cause of your problem, though, is the asterisk. That will match as
many characters as possible, including spaces and even paragraph
marks.

For the task as stated, I don't quite understand why you're using
wildcards -- you should be able to search for the specific word
"wouldest" and replace it with "would". But if you do want to use
wildcards, I'll suggest either of these search terms:

[! ]@dest
[A-Za-z]@dest

The difference is mainly that the first one would match digits and
punctuation marks as well as letters.

On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 04:28:06 -0700 (PDT), "Paul B." wrote:
Hi, I'm running Word '03 on WinXP sp3.

I'm trying to catch the word "wouldest" in a multiword selection and
convert it to "would". I've got the find/replace dialog open,
wildcards checked, all other options cleared, but this Find string:

(*)[! ]dest

is pulling in the entire selection up to and including the word
"wouldest". If I hit Next the selection recedes by one word at its
beginning. The way I see it, the [! ] should kill finding multiple
words, since the space is not allowed. Do I have that right? I must be
doing something wrong.

Any input would be appreciated.
p.