Thanks for both ideas, I appreciate it. Of course, I should have thought of Google Search by myself, I use it all the time. But I blanked in the face of a new kind of quandary.

And the formatting correction is very helpful, thanks for that as well.

Rol

I solved the problem by find/replace tab with # before doing the find/replace \s+, and after I got rid of excess space, I reverse the fine/replace.

It's a good solution, and if there are 2 or more tabs, it correctly replaces them.