Search for spaces before

[Manolocs]

Hello,

I am trying to edit a long spreadsheet, I try to search and replace a " ?" with a space before for "?" without space.

I am unable, I know I can find "~? " but them will show me all "?".

Any one have a better way to replace it?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Aladin Akyurek]

Try...

" ~?" >> "?"

 

[Manolocs]

Does not work, "Can not find data you are looking for" message.
I was thinking in a formula to find

 

[Joe4]

Aladin's method works me, using Find and Replace.
In the Find, you should be entering space + tilde + question mark
and in the Replace, you should just be entering question mark

If it does not find anything, then I suspect that the space before your question mark isn't a normal space, but some special character. I see this a lot with data downloaded from the web and imported from other programs.

The first step is to determine what exactly that character is. You can do that by figuring out what number character that space resides in in your string, and applying the CODE function to it.

For example, suppose you had the string in cell A1:
How are you ?
The space before the question mark resides in the 12th position of that string. So we would use the following function to return the ASCII value of that character:
=CODE(MID(A1,12,1))

If you apply that methodology to an example of your data, what value does that formula return?

 

[bhos123]

Cntrl+H is not working?

 

[Manolocs]

Hi Joe, returns 32

 

[Joe4]

That is a normal space, which means the methodology Aladin and I explained should work for you.

Make sure that you have selected the entire range that you want to apply this to, and have chosen the correct Options when using Find/Replace, such as making sure that the "Match entire cell contents" check box is NOT selected.

 

[Manolocs]

for some reason it is working now, I clear all formats and worked.
Thanks a lot.