Manual line break macro (2002)

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Afternoon –

Am trying to edit a macro, but don’t know the correct syntax. I do a lot of copy/paste from the Web and find that most of the text comes over with manual line breaks. The macro below does delete those breaks and gives me what I need. But, when there is a manual line break on the next line, I want to change that into a paragraph mark.

I’ve used Find and Replace ( ^l^l ) ( ^p^p ) but am quite sure there must be a way to combine this with the macro below.

Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
With Selection.Find
.Text = “^l”
.Replacement.Text = ” ”
.Forward = True
End With
Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll

Thank you very much,
Curious

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One age-old technique is to find all pairs of two adjacent line breaks, change those to an uncommon character, such as Chr(254), then run your replace for all remaining line breaks (to spaces or whatever), then change the Chr(254) back into paragraph breaks. The newer, lazier way is to get AutoFormat to handle your new text, but I don’t know whether that can be done in VBA.

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Jefferson, Hi –

Autoformat did not make any changes………………..But, thanks for the suggestion.

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AutoFormat usually works for me. Could you attach a sample document where it doesn’t work?

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Thanks for offering to see a sample, Hans.

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Those lines are so short that AutoFormat assumes the line breaks are intentional. You can try the following code:

With Selection.Find
.ClearFormatting
.Replacement.ClearFormatting
' Replace two line breaks with a paragraph end
.Text = "^l^l"
.Replacement.Text = "^p"
.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
' Replace single line breaks with a space
.Text = "^l"
.Replacement.Text = " "
.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
End With

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Hmm, I’ve been doing some tests, and I cannot get AutoFormat to remove superfluous line breaks consistently. I’ve used it successfully in the past, so I know it’s able to do it, but it doesn’t remove line breaks in several documents I tried it on. So Edit | Replace or a macro may be the best solutions.

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Hans –

Many thanks. Works perfectly, regardless of line length.

Curious

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