Microsoft Word - removing index entries with find/replace and wildcards

[pendle666]

Hello everyone

I've a PDF document which has the index codes {XE "blah"} visible within it and I've been asked if they can possibly be removed.

The document is in 18th century English and is hard enough to read without the index code in there too.

Once converted from PDF to Word, I thought that if I used find/replace with Wildcards that I could search for {XE*} where * is whatever the index text is and replace it with nothing.

But I'm getting an error message: "The Find What text contains a Pattern Match expression which is not valid". Word doesn't seen to want to search for { quotes.

So basically what I want to do is remove anything in between { and } and remove the {} as well.

Is there a way to do this without VBA?

thanks


thank you for helping

____________
Pendle

 

[Andrzejek]

How about this little video: How to Delete All Index Markers At Once in Microsoft Word

---- Andy

"Hmm...they have the internet on computers now"--Homer Simpson

 

[mikrom]

To find anything in between { and } try the following:
In Find and Replace toggle Use wildcards and then in Find What use this:

\{*\}

 

[Andrzejek]

I believe these [tt]{XE "blah"}[/tt] are not part of the text in Word, they are hidden characters like spaces, paragraph markers, or tab marks, etc. and you can see them only if you turn:

---- Andy

"Hmm...they have the internet on computers now"--Homer Simpson

 

[pendle666]

Hello everyone

Thank you for the replies.

The option that works for me is the Find/Replace with Wildcards:

\{*\}

I hadn't used the \ when I tried originally.

The other methods didn't work because the original Word document had the indexing codes all showing and then it was saved to PDF with those codes visible. When converting it back to a Word document it just shows it as text so I couldn't switch it off. I believe the original files were created a number of years ago so probably a very old version of Word.



thank you for helping

____________
Pendle