Tracey proofreads loads of documents and was wondering how to find where a word and number have been combined accidentally as the space wasn't included, such as "and317." She wonders how she can perform Find and Replace to eliminate this issue.
This sort of task can be easily done with Find and Replace. First, let's say that you just want to find occurrences that you note—a letter followed immediately by a digit. You can do that by following these steps:
At this point, Word will find and stop at the next occurrence of a letter followed by a digit. You can, at this point, make any edits desired and then continue searching.
For Tracey's purposes, though, it might be better to let Find and Replace do the heavy work. Follow these steps:
Figure 1. Getting ready to find a letter followed by a digit and insert a space.
The key to these steps is steps 3 through 5. You are telling Word that you want to do a wildcard search. Then, in step 4, you are defining a pattern for what should be found. You are specifying that you want a letter in the range A-Z or a-z followed by a digit in the range 0-9. The inclusion of the parentheses in step 4 is very important, as they define matches that can be referenced in step 5. There, the \1 indicates you want to use whatever was matched by the pattern in the first set of parentheses in step 4, and \2 indicates you want the match from the second set of parentheses. Note that between these two there is a space, so the result is that you are inserting a space between the letter and the digit.
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2021-04-19 12:23:08
Falk
If, as the character pattern suggest, we are dealing with 'regular expressions', a '+' after the right brackets ']' respectively might help in selecting the entire number as well as the entire following word in question. Like so:
([A-Z,a-z]+)([0-9]+)
Haven't tried this out though.
2021-04-19 10:21:07
Martyn Crawford
Seems that this only works on the letter and number that are next to each other, not on the entire letters string and the entire numbers string. This means that using "\2 \1" instead of "\1 \2" only swaps and separates those middle two characters.
2021-04-18 04:59:04
Falk
Thanks for hint on the "wildcard" approach - I didn't know about this feature. One little drawback of the presented solution is, that it will not work as desired on all languages. The "regular expression" used in the "Find" textbox only catches normal english alphabet letters from a to z, capitalized or not. In many languages, however, there are letter accents, like the German "Umlaute" (ä,ö,ü) or the French accents (e.g. é, è, ê). Of course, the regular expression can then be expanded to fit the needs of the language used.
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