Remove unwanted hyphens using “Find & Replace”

Question

How do I remove unwanted hyphens from some text I have copied out of a PDF into Word. The criteria is that I would like to remove any hyphen that does not have a space either to its left or right.

Currently, the words look like this because of the way they have been copied: The qui-ck brown fox- jumps o-ver the lazy dog. By the end, I only want the hyphen between fox and jumps to survive.

Answer 1

Try putting this into the Find box: [! ]-[! ] (note the spaces after the !) Make sure that "Use Wildcards" is checked.

Explanation:

[! ] Any non-space character. The [ and ] characters group patterns together while the ! negates it.

- This is the literal character -

So [! ] - [! ] is a - with non-space characters on either side.

Example character string that matches: foo-bar

Example character strings that do not match: foo- bar foo - bar foo -bar foobar, etc.