VBA replace certain carriage - vba

Question

All.
I am used to programming VBA in Excel, but am new to the structures in Word.
I am working through a library of text files to update them. Many of them are either OCR documents, or were manually entered.
Each has a recurring pattern, the most common of which is unnecessary carriage returns.
For example, I am looking at several text files where there is a double return after each line. A search and replace of all double carriage returns removes all paragraph distinctions.
However, each line is approximately 30 characters long, and if I manually perform the following logic, it gives me a functional document.
If there is a double carriage return after 30+ characters, I replace them with a space.
If there were less than 30 characters prior to the double return, I replace them with a single return.
Can anyone help me with some rudimentary code that would help me get started on that? I could then modify it for each "pattern" of text documents I have.
e.g.
In this case, there are more than
thirty characters per line. And I
will keep going to illustrate this
example.
This would be a new paragraph, and
would be separated by another of
the single returns.
I want code that would return:
In this case, there are more than thirty character returns. And I will keep going to illustrate this example.
This would be a new paragraph, and would be separated by another of the single returns.
Let me know if anyone can throw something out that I can play with!

Answer 1

You can do this without code (which RegEx requires), simply using Word's own wildcard Find/Replace tools, where:
Find = ([!^13]{30,})[^13]{1,}
Replace = \1^32
and, to clean up the residual multi-paragraph breaks:
Find = [^13]{2,}
Replace = ^p
You could, of course, record the above as a macro...

Answer 2

Here is a RegEx that might work for you:
(\n\n)(?<!\.(\n\n))
The substitution is just a plain space, you can try it out (and modify / tweak it) here: https://regex101.com/r/zG9GPw/4
This 'pattern' tells the RegEx engine to look for the newline character \n which occurs x2 like this \n\n (worth noting this is from your question and might be different in your files, e.g. could be \r\n) and it assumes that a valid line break will be proceeded by a full stop: \..
In RegEx the full stop symbol is a single character wild card so it needs to be escaped with the '\' (n and r are normal characters, escaping them tells the RegEx engine they represent newline and return characters).
So... the expression is looking for a group of x2 newline characters but then uses a negative look-behind to exclude any matches where the previous character was a full stop.
Anyway, it's all explained on the site:
Here is how you could do a RegEx find and replace using NotePad++ (I'm not sure if it comes with RegEx or if a plugin is needed, either way it is easy). But you can set a location, filters (to target specific file types), and other options (such as search in sub-directories).
Other than that, as #MacroPod pointed out you could also do this with MS Word, document by document, not using any code :)