Hi everyone,


I have such text

However, antibiotics have been used to kill harmful bacteria but inappropriate use of these materials enabled bacterial species to increase resistance to them which results in the emergence of resistance towards bacteria (Mmola et al., 2016). Using silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) could be a good alternative to antibiotics (Huh & Kwon, 2011;Ahluwalia et al., 2014; Allafchian et al., 2016; Bagherzade et al., 2017; Bar et al., 2009; Hsieh et al., 2007; Ibrahim, 2015).

I want to remove any parenthesis that contains four digits (year) or etal only because some parentheses are important and must be maintained such as (AgNPs) or may be just year (2010).

Thanks in advance

First, do a wildcard search for
\(* [0-9]{4}*\)
Replace with nothing

Then if there are some et al paragraphs left, do another wildcard search
\(*et al*\)
Replace with nothing

You can record these actions to get a first draft of the code that performs it. You can then clean up the code to make it less confusing or just use it as recorded.

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Dear Andrew,
Thanks for your comment
It's ok may be, but it has some bugs
if apply it to this text

However, antibiotics have been used to (2016) kill harmful bacteria but inappropriate use of these materials enabled bacterial species to increase resistance to them which results in the emergence of resistance towards bacteria (Mmola et al., 2016). Using silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) could be a good alternative to antibiotics (Huh & Kwon, 2011;Ahluwalia et al., 2014; Allafchian et al., 2016; Bagherzade et al., 2017; Bar et al., 2009; Hsieh et al., 2007; Ibrahim, 2015).

The result
However, antibiotics have been used to kill harmful bacteria but inappropriate use of these materials enabled bacterial species to increase resistance to them which results in the emergence of resistance towards bacteria. Using silver nanoparticles.

Main bugs:
(2016) has been removed
(AgNPs) also has been removed
the text after (AgNPs) has been removed to the end of the paragraph
all above items must be maintained
Also, I noted for some text, it removes the text between two parentheses, in addition to the parentheses themselves (the same case when searching for et al).

Dear Andrew, I suggest merging the search for number and et al in the same condition (also has a bug, in the case of (Huh & Kwon, 2011)).
Or as I noted for all parenthesis that I want to remove, they share this format, comma space four digits ", 1234" ----> (Huh & Kwon, 2011).
So searching for this format, I think it will produce better results.
Here is my code

Thanks

Hi! I think Andrew just accidentally included asterisks (It was a simple overlook, I'm sure, because his knowledge of VBA is immense). Try this to delete years in parentheses:

Thanks, but it removes parathesis in such pattern only "(2023)", which is not my need
I want to keep parathesis in such pattern (2016), (AgNPs).

Laith93, I see I have misunderstood your aim: I thought you wanted to delete only four-digit numbers in parentheses and nothing else. So my apologies to Guessed! His code should work properly but unfortnately it doesn't (you are right). I think the following will work:
" \([!\)]@[0-9]{4}*\)"

Also, it doesn't work properly, the same action as Andrew code.
Thanks

The code I proposed [.text = " \([!\)]@[0-9]{4}*\)"] works perfectly on your sample text: it removes parentheses with years plus text, leaving intact (2016) and (AgNPs).

Thank you so much vivka
It works perfectly now (sorry I miscopied the code)
Best Regards

Thank you, laith93!