Hi Bruce,

Good idea to replace the original goal (? after the second ":") with an
easier one (? after a letter+colon, and not after a number+colon).

For the original goal, you'd have needed to include the preceeding paragraph
mark in the "Find what:" expression, to you have an "anchor" from which
onwards you can count the colons.

A first try might then be
Find what: ^13*:*:
Replace with: ^&^p

But the "*" joker is a dangerous thing, which might match a whole lot of
text.
In most cases, matches should be restricted to a single paragraph. So most
times, you should simply replace all "*" with "[!^13]@" (= any lenght of
arbitrary text, but *no* paragraph marks).

So you'd get
Find what: ^13[!^13]@:[!^13]@:
Replace with: ^&^p

Greetings,
Klaus