Searching Word Documents

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Dominic - 31 Mar 2004 13:51 GMT

Hi All,

I am looking for a way to search a large number (300k+) of word documents
for a certain pattern of characters. For example I need to find any
documents that contain the pattern &##### where & = Alphabetic char and # =
Numeric char. It would flag a document containing A00001.

I have found the search function in VBA but it only works with exact
keywords and not patterns. Ideally I would like to search these documents
without opening them due to the over head of opening 300,000 docs. I've
found tools on the web that will search a closed doc file but again they
will only search for keywords and not patterns.

Any suggestions would be most welcome.

Thanks

Dominic

P.S Is there another forum I might be better of asking this?

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Dave Lett - 31 Mar 2004 14:29 GMT

Hi Dominic,

VBA does have a pattern match called wildcards. You can use this on a test
document:

With Selection.Find
.ClearFormatting
.Text = "[A-Z]{1,1}[0-9]{5,5}"
.MatchWildcards = True
.Execute

HTH,
Dave

> Hi All,
>
[quoted text clipped - 16 lines]
>
> P.S Is there another forum I might be better of asking this?

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Peter Hewett - 31 Mar 2004 14:49 GMT

Hi Dominic

You need a different approach. Using Word does not appear to be viable. The
math are horrendous. Assuming you can Open, Search, Close one document every
second that an 83+ hour job!!! And you'd hit problems along the way, documents
that wont open, Word crashing (eventually) etc.

I'd look at a third part alternative. The only gotcha is that unless the
software has knowledge of a Word document the search will search the metadata in
each document (the stuff you don't normally see) as well as the text and this
may through in false positives.

HTH + Cheers - Peter

Dominic <nospam@plz>, said:

>Hi All,
>
[quoted text clipped - 16 lines]
>
>P.S Is there another forum I might be better of asking this?

Reply to this Message

Dominic Godin - 31 Mar 2004 16:08 GMT

Hi Peter,

I was pretty sure that third party software was needed. I had written
software that searches docs by opening them and it is very time consuming.
I need a way of searching through a closed word file to find pattern
matches. Anybody know of any third party software/components (Delphi or
.net) that are capable of doing this. I sure they must exist, I'm just
having trouble finding them.

Dominic

> Hi Dominic
>
[quoted text clipped - 35 lines]
>>
>>P.S Is there another forum I might be better of asking this?

Reply to this Message