is the “Find What Expression” wildcard, which is what this article is about, and it certainly took us a long time to get to it! It’s because the angle bracket is itself a wildcard (a subject for another day), so we need to tell Word we’re using it as an actual character, which is what the backslash does.įinally, the rest of our search string looks like this: That needs to be followed by a hyphen, a right angle bracket, and yet another space, like this:īut now you may be wondering why I put a backslash in front of the angle bracket.
There’s also a space after cyan, so we’ll need to include that as well. So we need to include that space in our search string, along with the word “cyan” (in the following examples, I use to represent a space so you can see it should not actually be entered use a real space created by pressing the space bar): You can’t see it here, but there’s a space in front of “cyan” - the space that follows the pipe symbol. Now let’s look at the right side of our entry: In fact, it finds the beginning of each entry, which is just what we want. Testing that part of our search string, we see that, yes, indeed, it finds the following:
The wildcard for “an unspecified number of times” we have to put all of that into a “group” by enclosing it with parentheses. (After all, finds any character, no matter what it is, unless it’s a carriage return.) That tells Word to find any character except a carriage return, an unspecified number of times, until it comes to a space followed by a pipe symbol.Īnd we have to put both of those in square brackets so Word knows that’s a set of characters. So we might set up the first part of our wildcard string to look like | There’s a pipe symbol (|) in the middle, which gives us something to differentiate the left side of the entry from the right side of the entry. Rich’s challenge? Use wildcard find and replace to remove such entries, thus shortening the list and preventing unnecessary marking.įirst, let’s look at that entry again to see what we might need to do: But the real problem was that Rich’s reference list included more than 117,000 entries! That also meant the entry didn’t need to be on the list at all. In other words, the item on the left was identical to the item on the right, which meant that it shouldn’t be marked. Rich knew that some of the entries included duplicates, like this:Īrch Intern Med. Each entry includes a color, either cyan or green, which tells the program to use that color in highlighting the reference. The text to the left of the pipe (|) is how the entry might (incorrectly) appear in the references supplied by the author the entry to the right is how it should appear. It looks like something like this:Ī Gesamte Exp Med, | cyan -> Z Gesamte Exp Med.Ī Gesamte Exp Med. The list he sent me was for AMA style, in which the reference uses the PubMed abbreviation followed by a period. He creates a separate list for each reference style. The power behind that useful tool comes from lists of incorrectly styled references with corresponding correctly styled references. He was using his EditTools Journal feature to mark journal titles in references. Rich Adin recently sent me an interesting challenge.