by Allen Wyatt
(last updated May 4, 2019)
Word allows you to search not just for text, but also for special characters that normally do not print. Two of the most common characters you will find yourself searching for are paragraph marks and line breaks (sometimes called newline characters and inserted by pressing shift+enter). To search for these characters, follow these steps in Word 2007:
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Press Ctrl+F. Word displays the Find tab of the Find and Replace dialog box. (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1. The Find tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.
If you are using Word 2010 or a later version, then the interface used for searching is different than in earlier versions of Word:
- Press Ctrl+F. Word displays the Navigation task pane at the left side of the screen.
- In the box at the top of the Navigation pane, enter the text for which you want to search. To search for a paragraph mark, enter ^p; to search for a line break, enter ^l. (It is important to use a lowercase p or l.) If there are not too many matches, Word displays them in the Navigation pane.
- Use the Next and Previous arrows, just to the right of the pane tabs, to navigate through what Word found.
WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (8699) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Office 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Searching for Paragraph Marks and Line Breaks.
Author Bio
With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen.
Lowell is the founder and CEO of How-To Geek. He’s been running the show since creating the site back in 2006. Over the last decade, Lowell has personally written more than 1000 articles which have been viewed by over 250 million people. Prior to starting How-To Geek, Lowell spent 15 years working in IT doing consulting, cybersecurity, database management, and programming work. Read more.
Over at the Technet Magazine blog, they’ve posted a very useful article that explains how to search for special characters like line breaks, tabs, or even white space. All you have to do is use a special modifier in the search box.
For instance, if you wanted to search for a word with a tab character in front of it, you could use ^tWord or something similar. Here’s a few of the entries from the table:
| Search String | Searches For |
| ^l (lowercase L) | Manual line break |
| ^p | Paragraph break |
| ^n | Column break |
| ^m | Manual page break |
| ^b | Section break |
| ^t | Tab character |
Hit the link for the full list of special characters.
The following articles are available for the ‘Searching for Special Characters’ topic. Click the article”s title (shown in bold) to see the associated article.
Finding Fields
Fields allow you to add simple dynamic content to your document. Here’s how you can find the fields when you need to know where they all are located.
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Word allows you to search for specific ASCII codes in a document. If you use codes to search for alphabetic characters, you may get more than what you bargain for.
Quick and Dirty Paragraph Count
Need to know how many paragraphs are in a document? You can use Word’s Find and Replace feature to get a count quickly.
Quickly Changing Tab Alignment
Need to change the alignment of some tabs in a multitude of paragraphs? How you approach the problem depends on whether those paragraphs are formatted using styles or not.
Searching for ASCII and ANSI Characters
Need to get down to the “character level” when searching for information in a document. Word allows you to search for any ASCII or ANSI character you want, as described in this tip.
Searching for Breaks
Word allows you to insert different types of breaks in your text that help control how your document is paginated. If you want to search for those breaks, use the technique described here.
Searching for Footnote and Endnote Marks
Do you want to quickly search for any footnote or endnote marks in your document? Word makes it easy using the standard Find and Replace dialog box.
Searching for Non-Black Text
Searching for text having (or not having) specific formatting is generally pretty easy. It is more difficult to search for text that is not a particular color. This tip explains how you can find just want you want by using a macro.
Searching for Optional Hyphens
If you have a document that contains optional hyphens (special characters that mark where a word can be split between lines), then you may want to use the Find and Replace tool to locate them. You can easily do that by following the steps outlined in this tip.
Searching for Paragraph Marks and Line Breaks
Word allows you to search not for special characters that normally do not print such as paragraph marks and line breaks.
Searching for Special Characters
When using the Find and Replace feature of Word, you can search for more than plain text. You can also search for characters that have special meaning or purpose in your document. This tip shows how easy it is to find these characters.
Searching for Special Hyphens
Word allows you to use a couple of different types of hyphens in your document, each with a different purpose. If you want to use Find and Replace to locate those hyphens, you’ll want to note the special searching codes you can use.
Searching for Tabs
Tabs don’t normally show up in your printed document, but Word allows you to still search for them. All you need to do is use the special code (^t) recognized by Word as a tab character. This tip explains how to utilize that code when searching.
Searching for Text that Does Not Have a Certain Format
You can easily use Find and Replace to find text that has a particular format to it. Most people don’t know you can use the same tool to find text that does not have a particular format. Here’s how to do this type of search.
Searching for White Space
White space permeates our documents, and sometimes you’ll need to search for that white space. Word makes it easy to select this special class of information through the use of the Find and Replace feature.
Special Characters in Pattern Matching
The most powerful search engine in Word use pattern matching, but the way you specify special characters in a pattern-matching search is different than in a regular search. This tip examines some of the differences that can affect how you do your searching.
Special Differences when Searching
Word includes two different search engines. Which search engine you choose to use will dictate what Word shows as available special characters.
A paragraph is created by entering text and pressing the Enter key. It can contain only one word or one sentence, or multiple sentences. Each paragraph ends with a paragraph mark that looks like a reverse P (¶).
The line break moves the next word to the beginning of a new line without starting a new paragraph. A line break character looks like a right-angle arrow pointing to the left .
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Text with two paragraphs where lines end with paragraph breaks:
Note: You can also see a right-angle arrow between two vertical lines . This symbol shows the line break that separate text around an object, wrapping text such as a caption text or an image from the body text:
A line break character and other structural characters, such as spaces, paragraph marks, and tabs (also known as Whitespace characters in typography, nonprinting characters, or formatting marks) are usually hidden, but you can display them.
To insert a line break, do the following:
1. Position the cursor in front of the word you want to move to a new line.
2. Do one of the following:
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On the Layout tab, in the Page Setup group, click Breaks, and then click Text Wrapping:
Line breaks are used to delimit a specific text or break a line before a word that would otherwise be hyphenated (see more about automatic hyphenation and manual hyphenation).
To remove line breaks, follow the two-step procedure:
I. Replace two consecutive line breaks with one paragraph break:
1. Open the Find and Replace dialog box by doing one of the following:
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On the Home tab, in the Editing group, click the Find list and then choose Advanced Find. :
2. In the Find and Replace dialog box, on the Replace tab:
- In the Find what field, type ^l^l (the caret symbol plus the lowercase Ls twice).
- In the Replace with field, type ^p (the code for a paragraph break).
3. Click the Replace All button.
II. Replace line breaks with spaces or remove them:
1. Open the Find and Replace dialog box.
2. In the Find and Replace dialog box, on the Replace tab:
- In the Find what field, type ^l (the caret symbol plus the lowercase Ls).
- In the Replace with field:
- Type a space if you need to place a space instead of each line break.
- Leave empty if you already have a space at the end of each line.
3. Click the Replace All button.
Note: Word offers a helpful feature named AutoFormat that can format selected text with a paragraph break at the end of each full line to delete all the paragraph breaks but the last. In some cases, it can determine where the “real” paragraph breaks are and leave them intact. To run AutoFormat, click Alt+Ctrl+K.
If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to ask OfficeToolTips team.
How to show/hide nonprintable symbols in a Word document
Replacing special characters
Pagination breaks in a Word document
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To find and replace special characters, follow these steps:
1. On the Home tab, in the Editing group, click Replace:
2. In the Find and Replace dialog box, click the More > > button:
3. Click the Special button, and select the special character or item you want to find and any text for which you want to search.
4. Position the insertion point in the Replace With text box.
5. Click the Special button, and select the special character or item to add to the Replace With text box. You can add more than one special character to the text box, and you can also add text before or after a special character in the Replace With text box.
6. Make sure that the All option is selected in the Search list box. If you want to limit the search to text before or after the insertion point, choose the Up or Down option in the Search box.
7. Do one of the following:
- To confirm each replacement on a one-by-one basis, click Find Next. Then click Replace to replace the text or Find Next to skip to the next occurrence.
- To replace all occurrences of the search text without confirmation, click Replace All.
8. When the replace session for the entire document is complete, a dialog box informs you how many replacements were made. Click OK or press Enter to close the dialog box.
9. Click Close in the Find and Replace dialog box to end the session.
Characters in the Special Menu
- ^p – Paragraph Mark
- ^t – Tab Character
- ^? – Any Character
- ^# – Any Digit
- ^$ – Any Letter
- ^^ – Caret Character
- ^u – Section Character
- ^v – Paragraph Character
- ^c – Clipboard Contents
- ^n – Column Break
- ^+ – Em Dash
- ^= – En Dash
- ^e – Endnote Mark
- ^d – Field
- ^& – Find What Text
- ^f – Footnote Mark
- ^g – Graphic
- ^l – Manual Line Break
- ^m – Manual Page Break
- ^
– Nonbreaking Hyphen
If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to ask OfficeToolTips team.
Using wildcards
How to show/hide nonprintable symbols in a Word document
Special types of spaces in Word documents
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- Terms
- Contact
We use cookies to personalise content and ads, to provide social media features and to analyse our traffic. We also share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners who may combine it with other information you’ve provided to them or they’ve collected from your use of their services.
By Aaron Parson
Even though Microsoft set the “Ctrl-F” shortcut to open the new Navigation pane in Word 2010 and 2013, the classic Find and Replace dialogue box still takes care of hunting down and swapping out text. There’s no direct way to type a line break into the search field, and unlike some special characters, such as a tab, you can’t even paste a line break into the field. Instead, find and replace breaks by searching for special codes that begin with a caret symbol.
Step 1
Click “Replace” in the Editing section of the Home tab to open the Find and Replace dialogue box to the Replace tab. “Ctrl-H” also serves as a shortcut to open the box.
Step 2
Type “^l” — a caret followed by a lower-case L — without quotation marks in the Find What field to search for new line breaks, or type “^p” to search for paragraph breaks. Most new lines in Word actually use paragraph breaks rather than line breaks — pressing “Enter” starts a new paragraph, whereas pressing “Shift-Enter” inserts a line break.
