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Find and Replace: Replacing a special character with a space

Anonymous
2023-09-17T22:49:59+00:00

This seemed pretty straight forward, but....

Here's a segment where I have a special character on a copy/paste. I want to replace this and all occurrences of the special character with a single space.

I've tried the 1) copy/paste of the special character or 2) cut/paste of the special character and 3) even some Special characters under the Special button in Find and Replace. None work... ;-(

Here's a copy/paste which includes the special character:

*****

breaks so it's two texts and people will often say to me ah no

fair

*****

For sourcing, it's YouTube's "end of speech-to-text conversion" line. Obviously, the above copy/paste of a sample didn't work out well. But just take a video on YouTube and see the transcript. The special character I'm looking to replace appears as a "backwards P" with the "P" filled in.

Tx

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For business | Windows

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  1. Jay Freedman 207.6K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2023-09-17T23:20:51+00:00

    The "backwards P" is called a pilcrow, and Word uses it to represent the (usually invisible) mark at the end of a paragraph. That character also appears on a button on the Home ribbon that, when turned on, makes all the nonprinting characters visible.

    In the Find/Replace dialog, when wildcards are not enabled, the paragraph mark is represented by the code ^p. That code and many others can be inserted in the Find What and Replace With boxes by clicking the More button to expand the dialog and then clicking the Special button at the bottom of the expanded section.

    .

    If you have occasion to use wildcard searches, the code ^13 must be used in the Find What box, although ^p continues to work in the Replace With box.

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  1. Anonymous
    2023-09-18T00:12:48+00:00

    Perfect... I looked for some character/code images within Microsoft and other sites. None provided the pilcrow image even when looking as ASCII and other codes. Tx

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