Help with a complicated search macro

Donovahkiin · #1 10-09-2023, 12:36 PM

Hello! I do transcription work where I write long documents with long question/answer segments. The bulk of it is written in a Q&A Style made for these documents, where attorney and witness talk back and forth. Sometimes an interruption happens which is written using the Colloquy Style format, until it later returns to questioning. So for example, it might look like the following.

Code:

Q   Good morning, Mr. Doe. 
A   Good morning. 
Q   When did -- hold on.  I'm getting ahead of myself. 
    Would you please state your full name for the record?    
A   John Doe.
Q   When did you hurt your left leg? 
         MR. ATTORNEY:  Objection.  Vague.

I'm trying to write a macro that will highlight if there's any times that on consecutive lines I lead it with the wrong speaker token. Meaning, if I have a Q line followed by another Q line or an A line followed by another A line. Each line leads with either Q or A followed by the tab key. The objection doesn't use any tab characters, it just changes to the Colloquy style.

I've been able to use .Find code blocks to search and replace other things, and I can successfully find a line using .Text = "Q" & Chr(9), but I don't know how to extend it for conditional checks like this. If I were to write out my goals in pseudocode, it would be something along these lines.

Code:

*  Search for "Q tab"
*  Search for the next newline character, Chr(10)
*  Is first character in the next line "Q tab" again? 
  - if so, HIGHLIGHT IT. 
  - if it's not, AND it's not "A tab", AND it's still in Q&A style, 
    - search for the next newline character again and repeat. (accounts for multiple paragraphs within a single Q or A)
  - else, we're done here.  We found that this "Q tab" is followed by an "A tab".
*  Continue for the rest of the document.

Then I would duplicate and mirror this macro to make another one that checks if there's two A lines in a row.

Any help I could get towards this would be massively appreciated!

Guessed · #2 10-09-2023, 05:23 PM

This will get you started.

Code:

Sub ShowDups()
  Dim aPar As Paragraph, sStart As String
  On Error Resume Next
  For Each aPar In ActiveDocument.Paragraphs
    If aPar.Range.Characters(2).Text = vbTab Then
      If Left(aPar.Range.Text, 2) = Left(aPar.Next.Range.Text, 2) Then
        aPar.Next.Range.HighlightColorIndex = wdBrightGreen
      End If
    End If
  Next aPar
End Sub

I put the error resume in because the loop would fail when looking for the paragraph after the last paragraph (and I couldn't be bothered complicating the code to deal with that).

Donovahkiin · #3 10-17-2023, 03:19 PM

Thank you!! It works for any quick Q/As back and forth to each other. But it doesn't work if one Q or A is longer and is made up of multiple paragraphs.

If you're able to add functionality to account for that, that would be phenomenal. If not, no worries, you helped a lot, and I'll look closer at it later when I can get around to it.

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