Microsoft Word: delete blank lines or empty paragraphs

Question

Ok, so if you search for "word delete blank lines" you get a lot of stuff but they are mostly talking about the special characters to replace two successive empty paragraphs, i.e. replace ^p^p with ^p. And before you ask: no, it doesn't work to replace ^p with an empty replacement, because ^p matches a carriage return and not a paragraph (i.e. it will replace all carriage returns in a document, transforming it into one long text).

However, I do have empty lines which are just lines with no text in front of a carriage return: in terms of regular expression I would describe this as

^$

Or in terms of HTML, I'm talking about this:

<p>Some text</p>
<p></p>
<p>some more text</p>

And in vi I would simply delete blank lines. But I cannot export the word, modify text and import, it's using heavy formatting, etc.

Using Microsoft Word 2007.

Answer 1

@mutzmatron is right, replacing ^p^p with ^p actually is the proper way.

However, when my documents contains e.g. ^p^p^p^p or similar, it won't pick them all up and will again leave ^p^p. So I've to run this search/replace operation a few times until all cases have been covered.

Answer 2

Another way by using Wildcard:

Tick "Use wildcards" in search and replace window.

search: (^13)^13{1,}.

replace:\1.

^13 is the paragraph mark under wildcard mode. It would search for one paragraph mark followed by at least one other paragraph mark(s). Only keep the first paragraph mark, which marks the end of a non-empty line.