Saturday, January 25, 2014

How to Extract Wild Card Matches in Word Document using Word VBA / Export Find Matches to Text File using VBA

How to use Word VBA to Find Wild Card Matches in Multiple Word Documents and Extract them 


There are many situations where a particular format throughout the document that needs to be extracted. The answer would be 


1) Wild Card Search
2) Regular expressions

Lets consider wild card search for this post for a document that contains Reference Citations within square brackets [...]

The following snippet Loops through all documents in a folder, opens them and searches for content within Square Brackets 

It exports the matches to a Text File (Can store in Excel also)


Sub Extract_WildCard_Matches()

Dim sWildCard As String
Dim sDir
Dim oWD As Word.Document
Dim sPath As String


sWildCard = "\[[!\[\]]{1,}\]"

sPath = "C:\Documents\"
sDir = Dir$(sPath & "*.docx", vbNormal)

Do Until LenB(sDir) = 0

 Set oWD = Documents.Open(sPath & sDir)

    Open "C:\Match_Output.txt" For Append As #1
    
        Selection.HomeKey wdStory, wdMove
        
        Selection.Find.Execute FindText:=sWildCard, MatchWildcards:=True
        
        Do While Selection.Find.Found
            
            Print #1, ActiveDocument.Name & vbTab & Selection.Range.Text
            
            Selection.Range.Collapse wdCollapseEnd
            
            Selection.Find.Execute
        Loop
        
    Close #1

 oWD.Close False

 sDir = Dir$

Loop




End Sub

5 comments:

  1. This code was very helpful, thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you this helps

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous1:55 PM

    Thanks this was just what I was looking for although Recording macros did help too. Other optional approaches to scanning text for patterns I found was the VBA Like operator (e.g. http://analystcave.com/vba-like-operator/). Works for Excel too

    ReplyDelete
  4. How would you extend the functionality to include footnotes etc

    ReplyDelete
  5. Your blog is very nice and provide me informative content thanks for sharing for more information about Open Close Workbook

    ReplyDelete

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