Search wildcard difficulty

Hi,

I'm having a greediness problem with Word 2003's wildcards. I'm trying to find each occurrence of the beginning of a line, followed by some text, then ending with "Page " and then a number. Here's an example:

This is a Chapter Name Page 13

So with wildcards enabled, I tried ^13?{10,65}Page [0-9]{1,2}

The problem there is that Word applies the {10,65} limiter to the entire previous expression, so I get multiple paragraphs selected. In effect, I get from the cursor point to the next Find hit.

So I tried placing the '?' in parentheses, I tried using [a-zA-Z ] instead of '?', and none of these brought any hits. That I don't understand.

The immediate question is how can I limit my hit to only one paragraph?

Thanks for any insight.

On Tue, 5 Apr 2011 06:43:10 -0700 (PDT), "Paul B." wrote:

Hi,

I'm having a greediness problem with Word 2003's wildcards. I'm trying to find each occurrence of the beginning of a line, followed by some text, then ending with "Page " and then a number. Here's an example:

This is a Chapter Name Page 13

So with wildcards enabled, I tried ^13?{10,65}Page [0-9]{1,2}

The problem there is that Word applies the {10,65} limiter to the entire previous expression, so I get multiple paragraphs selected. In effect, I get from the cursor point to the next Find hit.

So I tried placing the '?' in parentheses, I tried using [a-zA-Z ] instead of '?', and none of these brought any hits. That I don't understand.

The immediate question is how can I limit my hit to only one paragraph?

Thanks for any insight.

Use this expression:

^13[!^13]@Page [0-9]{1,2}

It says to find a paragraph mark followed by one or more characters that are
not paragraph marks, followed by a page number. There is no upper limit on the
number of not-paragraph-marks, but you're guaranteed that the found text will
all be within one paragraph.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
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