How To's Everyday Basics

How to Find & Replace Special Characters in Microsoft Word

June 15, 2017
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This article describes how to find and replace special characters in Microsoft Word. It is very easy for words with alphabets or numbers to be found or replaced. But in some situations, the word document might contain some special characters which are difficult to find using the normal way. This article describes how you can use Find and Replace in Word for special characters.

“Find what” Box Only

The following characters can only be used in the Find what box. Other characters that be used in the Find what box are listed in the “Both ‘Find what’ and ‘Replace with’ Boxes” section of this article.

 

Character
String
^1 or ^g
Picture (inline pictures only)
^2, ^f (footnote), or ^e (endnote)
Auto-referenced footnotes or endnotes
^5 or ^a
Annotation/comment mark
^19 or ^d
Opening field brace (Use only when you are viewing field codes.) (Selects whole field, not just opening brace.)
^21 or ^d
Closing field brace (Use only when you are viewing field codes.) (Selects whole field, not just closing brace.)
^?
Any single character
^#
Any digit
^$
Any letter
^u8195
Em space Unicode character value search
^u8194
En space Unicode character value search
^b
Section break
^w
White space (space, nonbreaking space, tab)
^unnnn
Word 2000 Unicode character search, where “n” is a decimal number corresponding to the Unicode character value

“Replace with” Box Only

The following characters can only be used in the Replace with box. Other characters that be used in the Replace with box are listed in the “Both ‘Find what’ and ‘Replace with’ boxes” section of this article.

 

Character
String
^&
Contents of the “Find what” box
^c
Replace with the Clipboard contents

 

Both “Find what” and “Replace with” Boxes

The following characters can be used in both the Find what and Replace with boxes. Other characters that be used in either the Find what box or the Replace with box are listed in the “‘Find what’ Box Only” and “‘Replace with’ Box Only” sections of this article.

Character
String
^9 or ^t
Tab
^11 or ^l
New line
^12
Page or section break (Replaces a section break with a page break)
^13 or ^p
Carriage return/paragraph mark
^14 or ^n
Column break
?
Question mark
^-
Optional hyphen
^~
Nonbreaking hyphen
^^
Caret character
^+
Em dash
^=
En dash
^m
Manual page break
^s
Nonbreaking space
^nnn
Where “n” is an ASCII character number
^0nnn
Where “n” is an ANSI character number