Is there a way to replace text strings?

Question

I copied the contents of a PDF Table of Contents into Wordpad, which looks like this:

Planning
Topic Planner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .561A
Math Background for Teachers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 561E

and so on for 20 chapters.

I am trying to replace each "........" of variable amounts of periods with a tab, so that I can then copy and paste the text into Excel, which will have the title on one column and the page on another.

Is there a program (like TextPad) that can do this? If so, how?

I've thought about Find and replace ". " but then I just end up with a bunch of tabs. And regular expression of .*$ in Textpad will also replace the page number.

Is there a method I do not know of?

Answer 1

Probably not with WordPad. Word has some capabilities with regular expressions but if you have Vim or access to a Unix-type machine, awk and sed would be two of the easiest ways to accomplish this.