Microsoft Office Word 2010: How to "Find and Replace" an entire line using "regular expressions" (wildcards)?

Question

I would like to "Find and Replace" entire lines in Microsoft Office Word 2010 which match some criteria.

I tried to find the solution in the official documentation, but I didn't find the answer:

• Find and replace text by using regular expressions (Advanced)
• Add power to Word searches with regular expressions

(btw. here are two more useful unofficial documents: Find and Replace using wildcards; Regular Expressions in Microsoft Word)

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Example

For example: I would like to search for all the lines which have the "Heading 2" style, and replace them so that they get between ## symbols: so this is the original text: This is my title, and I would like to find it and replace it this way: ## This is my title ## (this way I could transform a text's title into a Wiki-compatible heading 2 without any external plugins _{(EDIT: sorry, in the meantime I realized the MediaWiki-compatible heading 2 style uses == instead of ##, but it doesn't change the main point)}).

So after Ctrl+H, checking "Use wildcards", selecting Format > Style > Heading 2, I've tried this and it did NOT work: (*^13>) or (<*^13>), where ^13 matches "Paragraph break / 'carriage' return" (see this) - this made Word search madly, and the GUI got frozen for minutes (!). At the end, it didn't find anything (but I DO have texts with Heading 2 style).

OK, this is not the appropriate pattern, so what would be the appropriate way to search and replace entire lines in Word?

Answer 1

Perhaps I'm missing something, but for some reason I wasn't able to do this in a single search/replace operation:

Steps

1. Before:

   

2. Replace empty string (format Heading 2) with "## ^& ##" (no formatting):

   

3. After first replace:

   

4. Replace "^p ##" (no formatting) with " ##^p" (no formatting) (be aware that there is a space at the beginning of the replace string!):

   

5. After second replace:

   

Answer 2

I know the question is old, but not finding any practical solutions here or other places, I thought I'd post the answer for posterity's sake.

Perhaps Word has made enhancements to the function that allowed me to perform a single replace operation that did the job the asker described:

Find What: (*{1,})

---Style: Heading 1

Replace With: \1

---Style: Normal

Note that using (*) instead of (*{1,}) eliminated the first character in the line. Apparently, there's some special meaning involved in (*) that I'm not inclined to research.