George’s Blog

Have you ever found yourself copying text from Wikipedia and manually deleting the references [1], [2].. from the text? This is how to do it automatically, with the help of Word:

Go to Edit>Replace, click on the Replace tab, click on the More button, and check Use Wildcards; in the Find what box type \[?\] for single character references (like [1], [2]) and click on Replace all. For multiple character references, like [10], [11] etc. simply replace \[?\] with \[??\]. The tricky part was escaping the braces, because ‘[' and ']‘ are characters used by wildcards. I found the solution here.  Also, a screenshot: