How to find comma without following space in MS Word 2003?

Question

Sometimes I get docs from users that do not use the space bar after a comma, e.g. "Look,this is an example." In Word 2003, is there any search wildcard that I can use to find those occurences? I have tried `,?` and `,*` without success, also `,\\?` and `,\\*` are not working.

Answer 1

In the following example, there are several commas that are missing spaces before the next word.

You can do a Find and Replace to fix this.

Copy the following wildcard string and paste it into the Find What section.

(,)([! ])

Copy the following string and paste it into the Replace With section.

\1 \2

Your dialog box should look like the following:

Make sure you that check the Use wildcards option for this to work.

When you click on Replace All, you will see that the missing spaces have been inserted.

You might need to be careful if you have commas in numeric values. 

In this case, you might want to substitute the Replace String above with this one instead:

([!0-9],)([! ^l][!0-9])

The dialog box will look like this:

You can see that the numbers aren’t affected.

Answer 2

I'm not sure about a wild card that is specific to targeting an example that you provided, however, you can always use the find function (Ctrl-F for Windows, Command-F for Mac), then you can just type what you're looking for. Typing a comma (,) will show you all commas and help you find these errors.