I have Googled [as Calvin said, "Verbing weirds language."] for the answer to this and have had no success.

I have a long email correspondence (27 messages/replies) that I want to cut and paste into a single MS Word document, where no doubt it will be tucked away and forgotten forever.

All of the "reply" documents have lines truncated with the little crooked arrow symbol that I think may be a Linux line feed. In the sample paragraph below (one that I sent, that was quoted back in the reply) I have circled a few of the crooked arrows in red.

I would like to do a global search and replace to delete all those arrows and let MS Word format the line lengths. How do I do that?

tanstaafl.

You should probably massage the text in a plain text editor before bringing it in to word. Then you can replace an reformat any number of problem characters before unleashing Word to do its auto formatting.

In Windows I'd use the most excellent TextPad or a similar editor with great search and replace and stepped macro support. You can simply copy any offending character you don't know how to type and paste it into the search box. Very handy.

Such a plain text editor would also understand different line endings plus unicode and let you re-save the file with a different encoding and/or line endings. So you wouldn't even have to do any search-replce for linefeeds.

CTRL-F, then move to the "replace" tab, and cut and paste in there whatever symbol you want from the document.

But: those look like simplye carriage return symbols by Word. Is it possible you activated the Word feature that shows them?

I don't want make that much of a project out of it. I just want to extend those truncated lines so the final document doesn't run 35 pages or so. Getting ride of those line feeds will do what I want.

tanstaafl.

You'll also need to get rid of the quote markers ">" in the sample above if you want to run those lines together.

Search and Replace will do it. A file of hundeds of megabytes will take only seconds in a text editor. Don't know how good Word's search and replace is. I hate Word in general.

The Carriage Return symbol, aka Paragraph marker, looks kind of like a backwards "P", and the symbol I want to get rid of is the "crooked arrow" symbol. (see samples below) And yes, I do have the "show paragraph symbol" turned on. On purpose, even.

I think the arrow is from Linux, a hex "oa" or something, and the paragraph marker (carriage return plus line feed) is what Windows uses, and is hex "oa od", something like that. I am a bit over my head when it comes to octal, hexadecimal, ascii, unicode, etc.

MS Word won't let me cut and paste the arrow symbol into the search and replace box, that's the first thing I tried.

OK, got it! If I do a search and replace for ^11 [that's carat sign, eleven] and replace with [nothing], all the crooked arrows go away and the lines extend out the width of the page.

tanstaafl.

Omigod, Bruno! That's two things you and I have agreed on in the last couple of weeks. Next thing you know I'll be using a Macintosh.

tanstaafl.

Words search and replace is fully featured, once you dig into it, it can do all sort of clever formatting replacements for example.

Woah, let's start things off slowly. Maybe an iPad first with navigation. Besides, if the world is going to end in 2012, there's no sense in learning a whole new OS right now.