MS Word 03 - Find and Replace whole paragraphs

[fwild3]

I have a 1600 page Word 03 document with 388 iterations of the same paragraph (an e-mail msg) scattered throughout and needing to be removed. Word Find and Replace won't accept a paragraph as as search criterion. Is there some way to identify an entire paragraph for removal? Many thanks.

 

[macropod]

Hi fwikd3,

Word Find and Replace won't accept a paragraph as as search criterion

It does if you specify it correctly in the Find dialogue box. There si, of course a limit to how much text you can insert into the Find dialogue box. You could work around this by breaking the task down to smaller blocks. Alternatively, you could use a wildcard Find/Replace. For example, a wildcard Find/Replace coded as:
Find = The quick brown fox*^13
Replace = nothing
Will delete all paragraphs starting with the words 'The quick brown fox'.


Cheers
[MS MVP - Word]

 

[fumei]

And depending on how unique you can get for a search string, you could do a search through all paragraphs for that string, and action against that. Taking macropod's quick fox example:

Sub DeleteTheFox()
Dim oPara As Paragraph
Dim str_ASearch As String
str_ASearch = "quick brown fox"

For Each oPara In ActiveDocument.Paragraphs
   If InStr(oPara.Range.Text, str_ASearch) > 0 Then
       oPara.Range.Delete
   End If
Next
End Sub

This just simply tests each paragraph, to see if it has the string "quick fox" inside it. If it does, it is deleted.


unknown

 

[fwild3]

Thank you very much. The wildcard *^13 suggestion worked well except that the message had several hard returns in it and required some manual clean up. The deletions removed several hundred pages from the file. It made me wonder whether a code to search for passages with beginning and ending words might work. Thanks again. Mission accomplished.

 

[macropod]

Hi fwild,

the message had several hard returns in it

All that means is that it spanned multiple paragraphs, in which case, if the breaks are all in the same place, you could have used a Find expression along the lines of:
Find = The quick brown*^13lazy dog*^13


Cheers
[MS MVP - Word]