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I have an .rtf document open in TextEdit, and I want to find all instances of double spaces and replace them with a single space. Weirdly, it doesn't work - TextEdit can't find a string of two consecutive spaces.

It can find one. Just not two. Neither in Find mode, nor in Find/Replace mode.

Rich text mode. OSX 10.8.2. And yes, there are double spaces aplenty.

Can someone try this themselves, and report results?

Thanks Chap

==UPDATE==

I made it work by selecting & copying a string of two spaces from the document, and pasting it into the find/replace dialog. Then I viewed the document with an RTF-unaware editor and saw that the "two spaces" I'd copied were actually \'a0 (the first character is a space). Furthermore, I neglected to mention that I'd originally composed the text in Mail.app (RTF) and then copied and pasted it into TextEdit. Typing two spaces directly into TextEdit simply inserts two spaces, not the strange control sequence shown above. So this problem may just appear when copying and pasting into TE from another rich-text application.

If anyone can explain why Mail rtf is different than TextEdit rtf, that would be useful info to me, so I'll leave the question open for now.

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It's working perfectly for me in textedit. I'm running 10.8.2 as well, so it might be your problem. Wait and see what others have to say. – theAmateurProgrammer Nov 24 '12 at 3:10

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