Word – Regular Expression to match zero or more spaces in Microsoft Word

microsoft wordregex

I hope I'm just missing the obvious here, but how in the world do I match zero or more spaces with Microsoft Word 2010's "Regex" engine?

As a silly example, I want to match all of the following in a capture group:

cowseat grass
cows eat grass
cows  eat grass
cows   eat grass
cows    eat grass

I would normally do (cows\s*eat grass) and be done with it. But I can't see how to match zero or more spaces. I want to capture the whole phrase in a capture group, but I have variable number of spaces.

I've been using this document as a reference.

Best Answer

The document you linked to shows that Microsoft's "regular expressions" aren't really regular expressions at all; they're a bizarre hybrid (bastard child, rather) of shell-style globbing (http://www.tldp.org/LDP/GNU-Linux-Tools-Summary/html/x11655.htm) and true regular expressions.

Since the glob syntax makes use of the * character as a synonym for the regex .*, and Microsoft decided (as mentioned in a comment) to make @ equivalent to the regex quantifier + instead of * (which is stupid since a+ is equivalent to aa* for any atom a, making + unnecessary), it looks like you're out of luck.

My personal opinion is that (1) this is stupid and (2) calling these patterns "regular expressions" is misleading at best, but unfortunately I don't see any way around this except for abandoning Word in favor of a tool that properly supports regex. (Though I suppose in theory you could try to parse the xml-ish format of the docx file itself, extract the text, and then apply your regex....)

Related Solutions

Regular Expression for Find and Replace in Microsoft Word – Regex, Microsoft Word

Instead of copying your input text to Word, copy it to Notepad++ or any other editor with full RegEx support.

A RegEx string to select everything outside of tags or everything between > and < signs would be.

(?<=>).*?(?=<)

enter image description here

(?<=>) is a look behind. It looks for > signs and acts as an anchor. This way you can exclude the search string, which is important since you don't want <Afghanistan
.*? is a lazy quantifier and selects everything until the very next expression
(?=<) is a look ahead and looks for a < sign but excludes the searched sign itself. Just like the look behind

But you don't want to select the country names. You want to remove every tag. You need the opposite of the first regular expression. Somthing like

<.*?>

enter image description here

Open Notepad++ search & replace dialog
Select Use regular expressions
Find what: <.*?>
Replace with: nothing

Microsoft Word – How to Find and Replace Parenthesis Surrounded Text with Regex

There is no actual "RegEx" searching in Office, but you can use the "Use Wildcards" option.

So since it's not real RegEx, the . doesn't do anything to help. You just need the * wildcard.

The next trick is that while performing a wildcard search in Word, the brackets () are used for grouping (like in RegEx), so if you want to search for literal brackets you need to escape them with a backslash (\).

Putting all that together and I end up with this Find command, which works as you want (based on my testing):

\(TL by *\)

Find and Replace dialog settings I used:

enter image description here

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Regular Expression for Find and Replace in Microsoft Word – Regex, Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word – How to Find and Replace Parenthesis Surrounded Text with Regex

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