Thanks to everyone for the answer. That was a very clear explanation,
Jay. The function of the @ had escaped me. I have some Perl RegEx
experience, but Word's lingo frequently drives me batty.
Graham, the reason I'm trying to do this via Search is that I
occasionally want to convert KJV Bible verses to more modern usage, so
it's more than a question of the "wouldest" word, and I'm constructing
a macro to do it all (besides, I have a KJV dictionary installed, so
'wouldst' isn't flagged in spell check). I could have made that more
clear in my post. I'll probably doctor this up to only pick up "est"
word endings preceded by certain consonants, in order to avoid false
positives.
And Tony - sorry, but I refuse to ignore you!
Be well,
p.
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.
--
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.
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.