Available Caret Codes

When Jill is using Find and Replace, she can click on Special to see 'special' things she can use in either the Find What or Replace With boxes. Most of these are implemented with a caret (^) followed by a letter. Jill wonders if there is a complete list of all the 'caret codes' somewhere.

Click on Special in the Advanced Find and Replace dialog box, and Word displays special things for which you can search. What you see depends on whether your insertion point is in the Find What box or in the Replace With box. Plus, Word only shows what you can search for, not the actual caret codes. You can, of course, select each special item and Word will insert the caret code in the Find What or Replace With box.

In total there are 24 caret codes, as detailed in the following table:

Note that this list has been sorted by caret code. Each code represents a powerful way to match special characters in the document. Note that not all special characters that you can search for can be used in the Replace With box. For instance, you cannot search for a column break (^n) and replace it with a section break (^b). Judicious use of the codes to replace with the text that was found (^&) or with Clipboard contents (^c) can easily skirt around these seeming limitations.

Caret codes also apply when you are doing a wildcard search. However, the available caret codes are different for wildcard searches, as shown in this table:

Note that there are many fewer Find What caret codes, but essentially the same Replace With codes. There are also a group of other codes that can be used with a wildcard search, but those are not technically caret codes, so they are not covered in this tip.

There is also an anomaly to note when working with caret codes in a wildcard search. Notice that the ^m code is included twice in this table. That is because if you use it in the Find What box, it matches to both page breaks and section breaks. If you use it in the Replace With box, however, it is only a page break. This means that you could search for ^m and replace with ^m, and all your section breaks would convert to page breaks.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (2787) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Word in Microsoft 365.