Hi



I'm trying to construct a Find and Replace phrase to find all the email addresses in a Word document and then delete them. I'm struggling I think because the @ symbol is reserved by Word.

Can someone help? Grateful for any advice.



Best Wishes

Hi Chayes,

Are the email addresses formatted as hyperlinks (i.e. blue/underlined and pressing Shift-F9 after selecting one displays a hyperlink field)?

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

HI

They are unformatted plain text. I'm trying to select them either by Search and replace or by VBA and then remove them , but am having trouble getting the code right.

Thanks for your help.

Best Wishes

You should be able to use a wildcard Find/Replace, where:
Find = <[0-9A-Za-z.]{1,}\@[!. ]{1,}.*>
Replace = nothing
No code required. Of course, if you're doing this regularly, simply record the above as a macro.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Hi Paul

Ok thanks for that. it works like a dream and clears all the email addresses out. Brilliant.

Just A FYI - It did miss one email address which has an underscore in it , but I was able to remove it manually. It only removed the text after the underscore.



Best Wishes


Colin

OK, to handle those, it's just a matter of adding the underscore to the Find expression:
Find = <[0-9A-Za-z._]{1,}\@[!. ]{1,}.*>

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Hi

Ok Thanks for this.

I ran it and it does deal with those with underscores perfectly.

I've attached a file with 20 sample email addresses of varying configuration so you can see the effect of the formula. Results are pretty good.



Best Wishes

Attached Files

Email-remove practice.doc (20.0 KB, 19 views)

Try:
Find = <[0-9A-ÿ.\-]{1,}\@[0-9A-ÿ\-.]{1,}([^13 -/\:-\@\\-`\{-¿])
Replace = \1

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Hi Paul

I have to say I am seriously impressed. This cleaned them all out with no residual charcters of any kind. Fantastic.

RegEx was always an interest but never a strong point of mine , but I'm going to try to work through the logic of the formula for my own interest. Thanks again.


Best Wishes

To give you a hand:
< refers to the start of a word
[0-9A-ÿ.\-]{1,} (used twice) refers to a string of any length containing the specified range of characters
@ is an obvious requirement for an email address
([^13 -/\:-\@\\-`\{-¿]) says to tag whatever the first character is after the email address, which could be any punctuation character, a space, paragraph break, etc. (I got lazy and didn't bother excluding some non-punctuation characters)
\1 tells the replacement to use the first tagged Find expression.

I'll leave it to you to figure out the rest

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Hi,

Hope you still check this forum. I'm quite new to VBA and I'm struggling with a program like this. Can you write an example pls how to use the above code in a sub? When I try to insert it, it says syntax error for me. Thx

The first thing to establish is that the wildcard Find/Replace works for you - different regional settings can necessitate some changes. Once it is established that the Find/Replace does work, creating a macro for it is a simple matter of switching on the macro recorder and recording the process.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for your reply! I read some article about wildcards and now I'm more familiar with it, however I'm still having some trouble with solving this problem.

I tried with your code and I also tried my version: FIND = [A-Za-z0-9\-,_]{2,}[\@]{1}[A-Za-z0-9\-._]{2,}

Both are giving me the same error message when I try to search: "The Find What text contains a Pattern Match expression which is not valid"

Can you help me how to solve it?

Thank you

That suggests you're using a system that requires semi-colon separators. For that, change both instances of {2,} to {2;}.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Hi Paul,

This solved the problem. Now its working perfectly! Thanks a lot for your help!

Cheers
Csaba