How to Extract Wild Card Matches in Word Document using Word VBA / Export Find Matches to Text File using VBA

How to use Word VBA to Find Wild Card Matches in Multiple Word Documents and Extract them 

There are many situations where a particular format throughout the document that needs to be extracted. The answer would be 

1) Wild Card Search
2) Regular expressions

Lets consider wild card search for this post for a document that contains Reference Citations within square brackets [...]

The following snippet Loops through all documents in a folder, opens them and searches for content within Square Brackets 

It exports the matches to a Text File (Can store in Excel also)


Sub Extract_WildCard_Matches()

Dim sWildCard As String
Dim sDir
Dim oWD As Word.Document
Dim sPath As String


sWildCard = "\[[!\[\]]{1,}\]"

sPath = "C:\Documents\"
sDir = Dir$(sPath & "*.docx", vbNormal)

Do Until LenB(sDir) = 0

 Set oWD = Documents.Open(sPath & sDir)

    Open "C:\Match_Output.txt" For Append As #1
    
        Selection.HomeKey wdStory, wdMove
        
        Selection.Find.Execute FindText:=sWildCard, MatchWildcards:=True
        
        Do While Selection.Find.Found
            
            Print #1, ActiveDocument.Name & vbTab & Selection.Range.Text
            
            Selection.Range.Collapse wdCollapseEnd
            
            Selection.Find.Execute
        Loop
        
    Close #1

 oWD.Close False

 sDir = Dir$

Loop




End Sub

How to Search and Highlight/Tag a string in Word VBA

How to Search Content for Specific String/Text using Word VBA

This action is performed often by programmers - there are couple of ways to do

1. Selection.Find
2. Content.Find

We will have a look at how to search a string, highlight the string and tag the same using Word VBA. This needs document to be open

Sub Highlight_Tag_Found_Word()

Dim sFindText As String

sFindText = "Olympics"

Selection.ClearFormatting

Selection.HomeKey wdStory, wdMove

Selection.Find.ClearFormatting

Selection.Find.Execute sFindText

 

Do Until Selection.Find.Found = False

        Selection.Range.HighlightColorIndex = wdPink
        
        Selection.InsertBefore "< FoundWord >"
        
        Selection.InsertAfter < /FoundWord >
        
        Selection.MoveRight
        
        Selection.Find.Execute

Loop

 

End Sub