from text to table, with conditions depending on format

Marco · #1 10-29-2015, 08:35 AM

Hello, is there anyone willing to help me with this problem?

I have a text formed by several short lines.
Each line start with either one word in italic or two words in italic, non italic words follows.
For example:

word1 word2 Word3 [rest of text]
word4 Word5 [rest of text]
word6 Word7 [rest of text]

What I need to do is to transform this text in a table where
- the first column will always contain the first word
- the second column will either contain the second word in italics, if this is present, or will be empty if a second word in italic is not present
- the third column will always contain the first word not in italic (which can be the second or the third word on the line

I was hoping to do this with a clever combination of find and replace, but I did not succeed.
My knowledge of VBA applied to word is next to zero, so I ask for some assistance.

One idea I had is to select rows starting with only one word in italics, and apply a particular find and replace condition only on those. In this way I think I can correctly place the special characters that I will be use to part the columns of the table.

gmaxey · #2 10-29-2015, 04:33 PM

If each line is a separate paragraph then select the text to process and:

Code:

Sub ScratchMacro()
'A basic Word macro coded by Greg Maxey
Dim oRng As Word.Range
Dim oTblRng As Word.Range
Dim oTbl As Table
Dim lngIndex As Long
  Set oRng = Selection.Range
  Set oTblRng = ActiveDocument.Range
  oTblRng.Collapse wdCollapseEnd
  Set oTbl = ActiveDocument.Tables.Add(oTblRng, oRng.Paragraphs.Count, 3)
  For lngIndex = 1 To oRng.Paragraphs.Count
    oTbl.Cell(lngIndex, 1).Range.Text = Trim(oRng.Paragraphs(lngIndex).Range.Words(1))
    If oRng.Paragraphs(lngIndex).Range.Words(2).Font.Italic = True Then
      oTbl.Cell(lngIndex, 2).Range.Text = Trim(oRng.Paragraphs(lngIndex).Range.Words(2))
      oTbl.Cell(lngIndex, 3).Range.Text = Trim(oRng.Paragraphs(lngIndex).Range.Words(3))
    Else
      oTbl.Cell(lngIndex, 3).Range.Text = Trim(oRng.Paragraphs(lngIndex).Range.Words(2))
    End If
  Next lngIndex
lbl_Exit:
  Exit Sub
End Sub

Marco · #3 10-29-2015, 06:40 PM

Hello Greg, thanks for your help.
It works greatly

However, I exaggerated a bit with the simplification:

what I called "first word non in italic" is actually a combination of 1-n words going from the first word non in italic to a special character (§) that I can easily add to the original text by find and replace.

That's beacause my first idea was to find a way to add "§§" between the first and the second word of each line only when the second word is not in italic.
Then I could convert text into table parting columns with §, and get an empty cell when there is not a second word in italic.

Also, the table should have: a fourth column whose content can be defined in one of the following ways (they will give the same results, choose the simplest to code)
- the word comprised between the previous § and the next §
- the first 4 characters after the previous §

The rest of the line will be contained, unbroken, in a fifth column

Thanks for your suggestions

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