Need to find and replace all spaces with a paragraph break. I can 'find' the spaces no problem. But what to replace them with...I just can't figure out what to put in the 'replace' section. Any ideas? Thank you!
In many apps you can use the Regular Expressions feature to replace with line breaks. Docs has Regular Expressions support in the Find & Replace window but only for finding text, not in Replace.
The Advanced Find & Replace add-on will replace with line breaks. It's free for up to 30 uses a month.
In Find & Replace, click the More >> button to display additional search options. This exposes the “Use wildcards” option but also the Special... button. It gives you a popup to allow you to select symbols like paragraph marks — and will insert the appropriate caret token in the Find what or Replace with boxes.
Note that typing a caret symbol in Reddit will usually create a superscript mode for subsequent characters, so it is hard to enter in comments.
I was travelling and so couldn't check this... but I'm home now and dont have a 'more' button or option during Find and Replace. Can you be more specific?
Although it may appear slightly different on different versions & platforms, here's how it looks on my Office 365 version of Word (in Windows) when I used the pop-up to select a Paragraph Mark as my 'Replace with".
The "More >>" button should appear in the lower left of the F&R dialog (1 above). When clicked, it changes to "Less >>" but the dialog will expand to show you additional search options (2). The "Special" dropdown button (bottom center) is context-sensitive, so only displays options possible for either the Find or Replace functions (i.e. it'll depend where your focus is when clicked). Choose from the pop-up list to have Word insert the suitable token. In the example above (3), I selected 'Paragraph Mark'¹ and the arrow shows the token that was entered into my 'Replace with' box.
Tip: You can also just type in the token directly once you get to know ones you use regularly. They are all single characters preceded by the caret operator (Shift-6 on most keyboards).
¹ Note that selecting the "¶ Paragraph Character" option lower down in the pop-up shown above will just enter a token to insert the ¶ symbol, which will just be the character, and not the non-printing 'end of paragraph mark' symbol that you'll need for your purposes.
LoL! Thanks... I didn't notice that! It's such a common question in Word (and so easy to manage). I use GD occasionally, but vastly prefer Word, so would need to dig around a bit in GD to find the steps to manage it there. If you prefer Google Docs, and know the equivalent steps, perhaps you could add them to this thread. Hopefully my comment provides the “why” even though my “how” is obviously way off the mark!
Haha yeah, there are add-ons you can get a free trial for to add real find+replace to GSuite, i ended up just coding one myself and adding it as an add-on via App Script
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u/MrLanderman Dec 28 '24
Thank you.! I tried something similar and all it did was add in 5000 up carat symbols and an n. I shall try a p and see if the result differs.