Excel Exact Word Matching

Question

Let\'s say I have \"Vegas is great\" in cell A1. I want to write a formula that looks for the exact word, \"gas\" in cells. Vegas ≠ gas, but the only search formula I\'m finding

Answer 1

One can also use regular expressions in VBA to accomplish this. In Regular Expressions, "\b" represents a word boundary. A word boundary is defined as the position between a word and a non-word character or the beginning or end of the line. Word characters are [A-Za-z0-9_] (letters, digits, and the underscore). Hence, one can use this UDF. You do need to be aware that words which include non-word characters (e.g. a hyphen) may be treated differently than you expect. And if you are dealing with non-English letters, the Pattern would need to be modified.

But the code is fairly compact.

Option Explicit
Function reFindWord(FindWord As String, SearchText As String, Optional MatchCase As Boolean = False) As Boolean
    Dim RE As Object
    Dim sPattern As String
Set RE = CreateObject("vbscript.regexp")
sPattern = "\b" & FindWord & "\b"
With RE
    .Pattern = sPattern
    .ignorecase = Not MatchCase
    reFindWord = .test(SearchText)
End With
End Function