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..
"Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote:
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.
--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
"BruceM" wrote in message
...
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.
"Jay Freedman" wrote:
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.
--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
BruceM wrote:
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?