Pay Attention to Case When Searching for ASCII Codes

Summary: Word's Find and Replace feature allows you to search for any ASCII code. Despite what you may think, searching for an ASCII code isn't case-sensitive. If you don't take the proper precautions, your ASCII code searches could return more than you bargained for. (This tip works with Microsoft Word 97, Word 2000, Word 2002, and Word 2003.)

You may already know that you can search for most anything when you are using Word's searching tool. One of the things for which you can search is any character's ASCII code. What you may not know is that searching for an ASCII code is not case sensitive.

What does this mean? When you search for an ASCII character such as ^0065 (the capital letter A), you should not expect Word to only return the letter A; it also matches with the lowercase letter a, which is an ASCII code of ^0097. This anomaly only happens when searching for alphabetic characters.

To get around the problem, make sure you utilize the Match Case check box, the same as you would if you were looking for letters instead of ASCII codes. In other words, if you only want ^0065 to match with an uppercase A, then you should make sure that Match Case is selected before doing your search.

Tip #1517 applies to Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

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Pay Attention to Case When Searching for ASCII Codes