Problem with encoding after find and replace.

Tool for Search and Replace across multiple files.
User avatar
PA

Problem with encoding after find and replace.

Post by PA »

I used text crawler to search through hundreds of word documents and perform a standard find and replace function and it seemed to work great. I then attempted to open one of the files and Word asks for me to select the proper encoding to make the document readable. No matter what I choose, it all comes in as symbols. ANy ideas why and how to correct?
User avatar
PA

Post by PA »

nm :(
User avatar
Fool4UAnyway

Post by Fool4UAnyway »

Word documents are not plain text files.

Changing a standard text might affect other occurrences of the same phrase in places where it is not (intended to be) text. This seems a bit unlikely, though.

It is possible that the Word document contains some information about the text, like the number of words it contains. Perhaps Word gets confused because this information doesn't match the actual contents anymore.

I don't even know if Word has such a feature, but would it be a problem to just perform this replacing in Word itself? Perhaps you can create a Word macro to do that.
Post Reply