Question

Say I have the following string:

"Hello how are you."

Since MS Word allows for regular expressions, I can use "*" to find the complete string. But what if I want to exclude the delimiters (the quotes)? I’m afraid that MS Word doesn’t support either of the two methods explained here. My question is: would there be any way to do this in one search query?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

There are different ways to achieve what you want. Here is one way to find text in VBA Word without the dilimiters using Regex. Let’s say you have the following text in Word Document (do not copy and paste it from here as the the website distorts the Double quotes. See the screenshot)

This is a sample

“This is another Sample”

“Wake me up before you go go”

“War of the worlds”

The code to return text using Regex between two quotes is as follows

Sub FindText()
      Dim regEx, Match, Matches

      Set regEx = New RegExp
      regEx.Pattern = "([^“]*)(?=\”)"

      regEx.IgnoreCase = False
      regEx.Global = True

      Set Matches = regEx.Execute(ActiveDocument.Range.Text)

      For Each Match In Matches
         Debug.Print Match.Value
      Next
End Sub

and if you want to say find "Wake me up before you go go" without quotes then you can use this as well

Sub FindText()
      Dim regEx, Match, Matches
      Dim searchText As String

      searchText = "Wake me up before you go go"
      Set regEx = New RegExp
      regEx.Pattern = "([^“]*)(?=\”)"

      regEx.IgnoreCase = False
      regEx.Global = True

      Set Matches = regEx.Execute(ActiveDocument.Range.Text)

      For Each Match In Matches
         If Trim(Match.Value) = (searchText) Then
            Debug.Print "Found"
         End If
      Next
End Sub

NOTE: The website distorts the actual double quote so I am posting screenshots.

FOLLOWUP

For the sample file that you posted, use this code

Sub FindText()
    Dim regEx, Match, Matches

    Set regEx = New RegExp
    regEx.Pattern = """([^""]*)"""
    regEx.IgnoreCase = False
    regEx.Global = True

    Set Matches = regEx.Execute(ActiveDocument.Range.Text)

    For Each Match In Matches
        Debug.Print Match.SubMatches(0)
    Next
End Sub

Sample File can be downloaded from here. Please note that this link will be active for 7 days.

Sample File

HTH

Sid