Replace Unwanted Line Break With A Word Space

[Andy Nickless]

I want to find situations in a text document where there is no Full Stop at the end of the line, but there is (of course) a Line Break (suggesting the Line Break shouldn't be there).

I can find what I want with this:

([a-z])[^\.]\n([a-z])

Unfortunately, I can't work out how to then replace that with a simple Word Space.

When I use \1 \2 it puts in a Word Space, but deletes the last letter off the \1 word and the first letter off \2

Any help will be gratefully received!

Andy

[Kerri Hicks]

Barring additional unstated details, this pattern should work:

([a-z])([^\.])\n([a-z])

replacing with 

\1\2 \3

Your current pattern is capturing the second-to-last character of the line with ([a-z]), and then the last character in the line with [^\.] -- but since you didn't put that into a capture group, it will be discarded.

You might consider using

([a-zA-Z0-9\s])([^\.])\n([a-zA-Z0-9\s])

or even just

([^\.])\n

replaced with 

\1 

(space at the end of that replace pattern). 

I plumped up the search string to include capital letters and digits, you may or may not want to do that. And I'm not sure if/why you really need the first capture group at all -- is it important that the second-to-last character and the next-line first character be a letter (or number or space)? 

But at the very least, putting a capture group around that character class that excludes the period should give you what you need.

--Kerri

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[Andy Nickless]

Thank you for your reply, Kerry.

Very helpful - I modified ([^\.])\n and it's working very well!