Suggestions for how to approach this problem?

[Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch]

In <4640ca5b$0$23392$c3e8da3 at news.astraweb.com>, John Salerno wrote:

> I have a large list of publication citations that are numbered. The 
> numbers are simply typed in with the rest of the text. What I want to do 
> is remove the numbers and then put bullets instead. Now, this alone 
> would be easy enough, with a little Python and a little work by hand, 
> but the real issue is that because of the way these citations were 
> typed, there are often line breaks at the end of each line -- in other 
> words, the person didn't just let the line flow to the next line, they 
> manually pressed Enter. So inserting bullets at this point would put a 
> bullet at each line break.
> 
> So I need to remove the line breaks too, but of course not *all* of them 
> because each reference still needs a line break between it. So I'm 
> hoping I could get an idea or two for approaching this. I figure regular 
> expressions will be needed, and maybe it would be good to remove the 
> line breaks first and *not* remove a line break that comes before the 
> numbers (because that would be the proper place for one), and then 
> finally remove the numbers.

I think I have vague idea how the input looks like, but it would be
helpful if you show some example input and wanted output.

Ciao,
	Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch