Regex Microsoft Word without destroying document formatting

Question

It\'s well known that word\'s find and replace \"wildcards\" features suffer some severe limitations.

The following code implements true regex find and replace in a

Answer 1

@Some_Guy: thanks for asking this question, I had a similar problem and your post saved me quite a bit of time.

This is the kludge I came up with:

Sub RegEx(Before As String, After As String, _
          Optional CaseSensitive As Boolean = False, _
          Optional Location As Range = Nothing, _
          Optional DebugMode As Boolean = False)

    'can't declare activedocument.range in parameters
    If Location Is Nothing Then Set Location = ActiveDocument.Range

    Dim j As Long
    Dim regexp As Object
    Dim Foundmatches As Object
    Dim Match As Object
    Dim MatchRange As Range
    Dim offset As Integer: offset = 0
    Set regexp = CreateObject("vbscript.regexp")

    With regexp
        .Pattern = Before
        .IgnoreCase = Not CaseSensitive
        .Global = True

        'set foundmatches to collection of all regex matches
        Set Foundmatches = .Execute(Location.Text)
        For j = Foundmatches.Count - 1 To 0 Step -1

            If DebugMode = True Then
                'debugging
                Debug.Print Foundmatches(j), .Replace(Foundmatches(j), After)
            Else
                'REAL LIFE

                'run a plain old find/replace on the found string and eplace strings
                With ActiveDocument.Range.Find
                    .ClearFormatting
                    .Replacement.ClearFormatting
                    .Replacement.Font.Hidden = True
                    .Text = Foundmatches(j)
                    .Replacement.Text = regexp.Replace(Foundmatches(j), After)
                    .Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
                End With
            End If
        Next j
    End With
End Sub

Basically I use a simple find/replace with strings that match each item found (and would be replaced) with a regex, would decent support for it exist in Word). Note that any text replaced takes on the formatting of the first replaced character, so if the first word is in bold, then all the replaced text will be bold.