Quickly edit text in a list of items in MS Word (or, an intro to regular expressions)
Find/Replace in MS Word is a powerful tool, but many people don’t realize just how powerful it can be.
I had a list of dates I wanted to put quotes around. Here is what I wanted to happen:
I could have done it one by one, but I am lazy. Not only am I lazy, there is a shortcut you can use — so why waste time? With a little bit of regular expression magic, you can do this in about 10 seconds. What are regular expressions? Well . . .
For the uninitiated, regular expressions is tech-speak for pattern matching. Have you ever had to add some text to a long list of items? You could do it manually, one list item at a time, or you could use regular expressions and do it all in one go.
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To start, I go to Edit > Replace.
I click the “More” button.
Finally, I check “Use wildcards”
For more on wildcards, trust wikipedia’s entry (because it’s written by NERDS!). The summary is, a wildcard is a single character (like *) used to represent something. * happens to represent ANYTHING. So if you try and Find: *, you will match every single character in your document.
Now to write the Find text. I’ll begin with the end, and break it down for you. The final expression I used is ([0-9]{1,2}/[0-9]{1,2}/[0-9]{4}).
Now, if you’re not already familiar with regular expressions, that looks like a whole bunch of garbage. What I am trying to do here is find ANY date in the MM/DD/YYYY format.
Let’s start with the first and the last characters — “(” and “)”. Surrounding anything with parenthesis is a way to say, “Save this value so I can use it later.” So if I had said Find: (Abc), Abc would be saved. (Abc) is stored in 1. You can put 1 in the “Replace with:” field, and it will find Abc into your document. This is not useful unless you want to add something to the end or beginning of a word. So for example, if I asked MS Word to replace (Abc) with 1d, Abc would change to Abcd. ANY Abc in the document will change into Abcd after you run this Find/Replace. Sounds weird, so let’s take a look:
So again, my full expression is ([0-9]{1,2}/[0-9]{1,2}/[0-9]{4}). We’ve covered the parenthesis, so I’ve made them bold.
Next, let’s look at the “[0-9]{4}”. “0-9″ means, “find me any number between 0 and 9″, or, “find 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 or 9″. The {4} means, “look for a number between 0 and 9 four times.” If I hadn’t used the Brackets, and said 0-9{4}, it would have looked for “9999″. So brackets [] are used to define groups of things you want to search for.
[0-9]{4} will match 1234, 2008, 3577, 9876, 9999 — any series of four numbers.
([0-9]{1,2}/[0-9]{1,2}/[0-9]{4}). So now let’s look at the slashes /. There is a slash before the [0-9]{4}. This means we’re searching for a slash, followed by four numbers. Can you tell yet that I’m looking for a date?
What about [0-9]{1,2}? Well a{4} means, “find ‘aaaa’” but a{1,2} means, “Find ‘a’ or ‘aa.’” Normally, using regular expressions we’d just say a+. Which means, “Find ‘a’ one or more times.” But, as noted here, MS Word does not have an equivalent to the “+” regular expression. So the have this wacky comma thing.
So, the full string, ([0-9]{1,2}/[0-9]{1,2}/[0-9]{4}) basically means, find me any date in the format, MM/DD/YYYY.
Now that I have my dates, I want to put quotes around them. So, in the “replace” field, I simply say “1″. This will put quotes around the complete date I have found.
Hit “Replace All” and all your dates will now have quotes around them.
livetotry.com is written by nerds!
i’m calling you next time i have a really crazy Find/Replace situation on my hands