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?