Matching character ranges and paragraph breaks in Find in Microsoft Word

Question

I have several Word documents where line breaks (paragraph breaks) have been added purely for cosmetic reasons (probably by a human, but maybe by an OCR system or something similar). I want to remove these extra line breaks from the documents. Basically, an 'extra' line break is one that is surrounded by lower-case letters on either side (with optional whitespace). Unfortunately, though, if I want to find paragraph breaks in Word (^p) I can't use character classes to find only lower-case letters ([a-z]) and vice versa.

Basically I want to use a multiline regex on the document so I can find something like the following:

/[a-z]\s*\n\s*[a-z]/

and replace the newline with a space. Is there any way I can search for both paragraph marks (^p in Word) and character classes (or just lower-case letters in general)?

EXAMPLE:

TITLE¶
This is some text.

would not match, but

this text is on one line and¶
goes on to the next line.

would match and the “¶” would be replaced by a space.

Answer 1

I can’t tell from what you’ve said whether you know that, if you click on More >> in the Microsoft Word “Find and Replace” dialog box, you get a “Search Options” panel that includes a “Use wildcards” option.  Note that it supports an arcane wildcard language, not regular expression notation.  To begin with this option, use [a-z]^13[a-z].  For some reason, you can’t use ^p in a wildcard search, but ^13 is the wildcard-enabled equivalent of ^p.

The whitespace is a little trickier.  The best I can come up with is that you have to do the search four times, using

• [a-z]^13[a-z]
• [a-z][^t ]{1,99}^13[a-z]
• [a-z]^13[^t ]{1,99}[a-z] ,   and
• [a-z][^t ]{1,99}^13[^t ]{1,99}[a-z]

since, oddly enough, ^t works in wildcard mode.  \s and * don’t mean what they mean in regular expressions.  {n,m} does work, but n has to be positive.  And note that you can’t just replace matches with a space, since the last preceding letter and the first following letter are included in the match, and would get clobbered.

For extra credit: You might want to look for a - (hyphen) as the last printing character before the line break; but be sure to address these two (different) cases:

                                                          … surrounded by lower-¶
case letters on either side (with optional whitespace).  Unfor-¶
tunately, though, …

Answer 2

^13 is the wildcard-enabled equivalent of ^p.

This is almost true, but note there is a slight difference between ^13 and ^p. Paragraph breaks replaced with ^13 seem to lose the double space that you get with a normal-style paragraph break in Word.

first paragraph¶

second paragraph¶

third paragraph¶

becomes

first paragraph¶
second paragraph¶
third paragraph¶

To solve this, be sure to use ^p paragraph marks in the replace portion of the find and replace dialog. The restriction on ^p with wildcards only applies to the find portion of the dialog.