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Subject:Re: remove spaces from Word From:Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- westnet -dot- com -dot- au> To:Techwr-l <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Fri, 22 Mar 2013 09:01:08 +0800 (WST)
Phil, just to round out Fred's great reply, you can find a complete list of the operators and tokens by clicking the Help button from the Find/Replace dialog. In Word 2010 the topic is titled 'Find and replace text and other data in your Word 2010 files'. Look for the tables under these subheadings:
Search by using wildcards to find specific letters
Use codes to find letters, formatting, fields, or special characters
You should be able to find the equivalent of virtually all the operators you're used to in sed.
Gene Kim-Eng said:
> I do this more selectively, such as replace period plus two spaces
> with period plus one space. And click through the document one change
> at a time. The one-click replace all operation is more often than not
> the path to more work than it saves.
I prefer to be cautious too, but you can often do a first pass to handle to easy cases before reverting to Find Next - check - Replace. For example, to fix two spaces at the end of a sentence :
Find what: . ([A-Z])
Replace with: . \1
In other words:
- find a full stop followed by two spaces followed by any capital letter
- replace it with a full stop followed by one space followed by the same capital letter
Another common case is where there are two spaces between words in the middle of the sentence:
Find what: ([a-z]) ([a-z])
Replace with: \1 \2
In other words:
- find a lowercase letter followed by two spaces followed by another lowercase letter
- replace it with the first letter in the found string followed by one space followed by the second letter in the found string
Once you've dealt with these cases there may be only a handful of other double-space instances left. Easy to check and fix one at a time.
Stuart
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