Finding/deleting blocks of text (Word 2000)

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Is it possible to automatically find every occurrence of a long text string which is repeated throughout a document and replace it with nothing? I’m trying to archive lengthy email correspondence, and one of the blocks would consist of the text signature which takes up some 8 lines of space. I’d also like to find the repetitive routing lines and replace them with nothing. Seems like there ought to be a way to highlight one occurrence of such “garbage” and paste it into the Find box of the Find/Replace function, but I haven’t been able to figure this out. Any help would be welcome!
Thanks,
Gini

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Have you tried selecting (highlighting) and copying the garbage you have in mind and pasting it into the “find what” window? If that isn’t working, what is probably the problem is the special end-of-line characters or end-of-paragraph marks.

Try first selecting the entire email and using Format => AutoFormat… with the email setting. This should normalize the end-of line marks and may delete many of them.

The find/replace special character for a manual line break in word is ^l, for an end-of-paragraph mark it is ^p.

Hope this helps. If not, you may want to take a look at the Word MVP FAQ site and search for “replace” and “wildcards.”

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Hi Gini:

Check out this post for a very useful way to delete duplicate paragraphs.

Hope this helps.

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Thanks for the responses! I did try pasting the text signature line in the Find What box, and that works to the limited extent that I can at least locate the beginning of each signature “box” (starts with a line of the = character). I couldn’t paste the whole thing, apparently, as suggested, because of the internal paragraph codes. As for the Internet routing garbage, so far my best solution seems to be just locating the beginning of each ( there appears such common phrases as “Return-Path:” or “TimeoutProtection” near the start of a new email), and then selecting and deleting each routing sequence manually. Since I have some 370 pages to clean up, this remains quite a task. This forum has already been invaluable, however, as I hadn’t been familiar with the Repeat Find methods!

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Gini:
If you can find a unique beginning & end of the text to be deleted, then you CAN do this quickly with Find/Replace.
Using Wildcards:
Find: “beginning text”*”ending text” (without quotes)
Replace: nothing

By the way, a paragraph mark can be found by using ^p (without wildcards) or ^13 (with wildcards).

If you have problems, why don’t you paste the exact text that you wish to delete here.

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Phil,
This is what I ended up doing, and it worked well where I could pick a unique ending. Thanks again for your help!
Gini

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