[RedRado03]

I am writing a probgram that searces for acronyms. I was wondering what the
wildcard expression would be to search for whole words that contained
characters such as: - or / for example:

Door-Mat123 or help/please

I am using a second criteria to identify it as a acronym based off the
microsoft word selection.

My search criteria can select Door then Mat123 but, not all as one
selection. Is there a way to write this? This is what I have.

Need to include the dashes and slashes within a word.

([A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9]*)

[Jay Freedman]

This search term will find the expressions you listed:

([A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9/-]{1,})

Notice a couple of things:

- You can include the hyphen in a character range by listing it last;
otherwise it's assumed to connect the start and end of a range.

- There's no problem with including a forward slash in a character range. A
backslash or any other special character would need to be preceded by a
backslash -- see item 5 in
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/UsingWildcards.htm.

- Using {1,} instead of * causes the search to use "greedy" matching, so it
doesn't stop on finding Door but continues until it finds Door-Mat123.

- If you immediately search again, the same search will find the second part
of the combination (Mat123). To avoid this, set up your code at the end of
each iteration to move the start of the search range to the end of the most
recently found occurrence.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
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RedRado03 wrote:
I am writing a probgram that searces for acronyms. I was wondering
what the wildcard expression would be to search for whole words that
contained characters such as: - or / for example:

Door-Mat123 or help/please

I am using a second criteria to identify it as a acronym based off the
microsoft word selection.

My search criteria can select Door then Mat123 but, not all as one
selection. Is there a way to write this? This is what I have.

Need to include the dashes and slashes within a word.

([A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9]*)