How to eliminate line-breaks but preserve blank lines?

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Joseph Geretz - 20 Nov 2005 02:31 GMT

I received a basic Notepad file which I need to convert to Word. The Notepad
file contains unwanted line-breaks which break every line at about 60
characters. I want to eliminate all line breaks except for line-breaks
immediately before and after a blank line, since these are effectively
paragraph separators. How can I do this?

Thanks very much for your help.

Joseph Geretz

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Joseph Geretz - 20 Nov 2005 02:45 GMT

Just to clarify: The marks at the end of each line are paragraph markers,
each paragraph is separated by a blank line.

Here's how I worked around this:

Replace: -^p with Nothing. (Eliminates hyphenated words)
Replace: ^p with Space. (Eliminates hard line-breaks)
Replace SpaceSpace with ^p^p (Restores paragraph breaks)

I think this took care of 98% of my formatting needs, but now I'll have to
scan through this and make minor adjustments. I guess there's got to be a
better way?

Thanks,

Joseph Geretz

>I received a basic Notepad file which I need to convert to Word. The
>Notepad file contains unwanted line-breaks which break every line at about
[quoted text clipped - 5 lines]
>
> Joseph Geretz

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Jay Freedman - 20 Nov 2005 04:20 GMT

Hi Joseph,

The next time you have this kind of job to do, see
http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/CleanWebText.htm.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
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>Just to clarify: The marks at the end of each line are paragraph markers,
>each paragraph is separated by a blank line.
[quoted text clipped - 22 lines]
>>
>> Joseph Geretz

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