"Alternation" with Find-n-Replace wildcards?

Steve Kunkel · #1 10-30-2021, 04:33 PM

Do you guys know if this is possible? I'm using VBA, though I guess this isn't a VBA question, per se. The top three are working regular expression setups from another project. I'd like to recreate those in my Word VBA project.

With the bottom three, the first two are working setups, but the very bottom one doesn't work because "(s|z|sh|ch|x|o)" seems to match any single character in the range.

I think what I'm looking for is called "alternation?"

For example I'd like this "xxx(s|z|sh|ch|x|o)es" to match
xxxches
xxxshes

but not match
xxxces

Is this possible?

PERL regular expression.

Code:

Find "s)([Tt]hey\s)(.*?)ies\b" and Replace with "$1$2y"
Find  "s)([Tt]hey\s)(.*?)s\b" and Replace with  "$1$2" 
Find  "s)([Tt]hey\s)(.*?)((s|z|sh|ch|x|o))es\b" and Replace with "$1$2$3"

Word Wildcards

Code:

Find "([Tt]hey )([a-z]@)ies" and Replace with  "\1\2y"
Find  "([Tt]hey )([a-z]@)s"  and Replace with  "\1\2"
Find  "([Tt]hey )([a-z]@(s|z|sh|ch|x|o))es"  and Replace with  "\1\2"

gmayor · #2 10-31-2021, 03:33 AM

You can't do this in one pass with VBA - see Replace using wildcards. You can however use regular expressions in VBA - see The Complete Guide to Regex in VBA - VBA and VB.Net Tutorials, Education and Programming Services

Steve Kunkel · #3 10-31-2021, 06:41 AM

Excellent resources. Thanks Gmayor!

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