Find & Replace--Wildcards

[Joe McGuire]

I have a list of 300+ medical/scientific article citations in Word 2003.
Each article citation is preceded by two paragraph signs, a 3-digit number
from 295 to 668 (in order), a period and a tab. I would like to remove
these numbers, the period and the tabs, but not any other numbers that may
be in the text--they are part of the citation. Getting rid of the paragraph
marks, periods and tabs is simple stuff. But I can't figure out how to get
rid of the numbers! I tried wildcards, and entering ^13 for the paragraph
and ^# for digits (as suggested in Mr. Mayor's excellent paper) but I get an
error message telling me that ^ is not valid for Find What. What am I doing
wrong? Is there a way to do it right?

 

[Greg]

If I follow your pattern, then this should do it:

^13{2}[!^13]*^t

 

[Joe McGuire]

Thanks! It worked for all but 3 or 4 of 360+ items! I will have to go back
again and study it carefully to learn how to do this.

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

I would use

^13{2}[0-9]{3}.^t

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

Thanks! It worked for all but 3 or 4 of 360+ items! I will have to go
back again and study it carefully to learn how to do this.

If I follow your pattern, then this should do it:

^13{2}[!^13]*^t

 

[Guest]

If the content looks as below (when the Show/Hide ¶ button is on), the string
beneath it should work:

This is some stuff
¶
¶
447.→Article name
¶
¶
549.→Other Article
¶
¶

Enter in Find What: ^p^p^#^#^#.^t

If it doesn't, the [3-digit number, period , Tab] are most likely the result
of formatting (Bullets & Numbering) or a list numbering style. Can you select
(using the mouse) those 3-digit prefixes?

HTH |:>)

 

[OM]

I would use a "Brute force" method (ie. no finesse at all !), and open it in
Excel (should have the data in one column), use Data>Text to Columns, then
delete the columns I don't want, save as a text file, reopen in word - voila
!

Rob Lepper

 

[Joe McGuire]

Thanks. That did it for all but a few. no idea why, but I fixed it
manually. Much obliged.