I am trying to search for trailing whitespaces in text cells in Excel. Knowing that Excel search accepts regex, I expected to leverage on the full feature set, but was surprised to find that some features do not seem to work.
For example, I have some cells with strings like ELUFA\s\s\s\s\s (note: in my excel sheet there is no \s, but just blank invisible whitespaces, after ELUFA, but I had to add these \s in here otherwise Stackoverflow would just remove these whitespaces and the string would just appear to be ELUFA) or NATION CONFEC.\s with trailing whitespaces.
I used the expression [A-Z.]{1}\s+$ into the excel search function expecting that it would return search results for these cells, but it does not, and just tells me that nothing is found.
However, what I find really funny is that Excel search is somehow able to interpret a regex like this A *. Using this expression, excel search does find for me only the ELUFA\s\s\s\s\s cells, and no other cells which do not match this regex.
Is there some kind of limitations as to what subset of the full REGEX that Excel search accepts? How do we get excel search to accept the full REGEX feature set as described here?
Thank you.
The Excel SEARCH() function does not support full regex. It actually only supports two wildcards, ? and *. From the documentation:
You can use the wildcard characters — the question mark (?) and asterisk (*) — in the find_text argument. A question mark matches any single character; an asterisk matches any sequence of characters. If you want to find an actual question mark or asterisk, type a tilde (~) before the character.
If you want to match spaces then you will have to enter them as literals. Note that finding any amount of trailing spaces could be as simple as ELUFA\s, with one space at the end, because that would actually match one, or more than one, space.
Related
I would like to go through and find all of the "End" statements in my code but skipping all of the "End x" statements like "End If", "End Sub", "End function", etc.--Just the pure "End". My thought was to use pattern matching, but I am unsure of how to do that.
I already tried using "End\n" and "End[\n]".
Does anyone know how to search for words that end in new lines?
The "find" function in the VBA editor does not support this kind of parameter/functionality.
You will have to manually step through the results and skip the ones you don't want to skip, or manually modify the "End" instances you don't want to catch, then search & replace, and finally restore all the End instances back to what you want.
Apologies for answering so long after the question was asked, but thought this information would help future readers as this question is still being actively found.
#TylerH is right that the specific search requested by the user cannot be performed in the VBE Find tool. For information, when "Use Pattern Matching" is selected the VBE Find tool supports use of:
? - single character
* - zero or more characters (on the same line)
# - single digit (0 to 9)
[charlist] - any single character in charlist
[!charlist] - any single character not in charlist
... where charlist can be a range of characters (eg [A-Z]) but must be in order (eg [Z-A] is not valid), it can also include multiple ranges of characters (eg [A-BD-E] matches A, B, D or E). Also to match any of ?, * or # then enclose them in square brackets (eg [*] matches an asterisk).
This means the VBE Find tool performs very similarly (perhaps identically ... but I can't provide assurances, VB and VBA not being the same language) to the VB Like operator, for which documentation is here
The alternative (which will perform the specific search in the question) is to use the 'Find Text' tool in the VBE Add-In MZ-Tools - though note MZ-Tools is a paid-for tool ... please note I am NOT in any way associated with MZ-Tools or it's author. The search text to use in MZ-Tools for the specific search requested in the question is: end\r?$
I need to be able to find every place in my document (hundreds of pages) where there is a formatting change without a space. For example:
a bold partnext to regular text
Or red text next to black with no space. I want to have my macro find each "word" (in the vba sense) like this, and execute code based on that character location accordingly. (The loop should identify the character position where the format change occurs... although I can do that part with a loop through the characters within the found word).
Is there a simpler way to do this than by looping character by character through the whole document and checking for a difference in formatting, which would be too resource-intensive?
Thanks for your help.
I would like to search my project for "group".
However when I use the search dialog, I can see all "group" results, but also "groups", "grouping" and "grouper".
I don't want to see those last three, only the matches to "group".
Is there a way to do this in PyCharm 2017.1?
I have tried quotation marks and match-case box ticked. Neither did what I was after.
You can use the Words option:
Words
Select this check box to have PyCharm search for whole words or their parts, (character strings separated with spaces, tabs,
punctuation, or special characters).
This check box is disabled, if the Regex check box is selected.
I'm using VB.NET, and my code contains a lot of strings that very often have double quotes inside of them. My problem is that as I'm fixing the string to escape double quotes (replacing every '"' with '""' inside of the string) it messes with the proceeding code, temporarily assuming everything is a string (since the double quotes don't match up) and completely messing up the formatting of other strings. It assumes that the start of a following string is the end of the current string which causes the actual string to be interpreted and formatted as code, which I have to go back and fix (since it adds spaces and other formatting characters that shouldn't actually be there).
Is there any way to disable this behavior? I didn't have the same problem in VS2013. I've been looking under Tools > Options > Text Editor > Basic, but I couldn't find anything relevant.
Additional Information: I can just modify the strings in a separate text document to escape all of the double-quotes (which is what I've resorted to for now), but in VS2013 I could easily just copy/paste the strings directly into my code without it messing up proceeding strings by temporarily interpreting them as code due to the uneven count of double-quotes.
This behavior is especially problematic when manually adding double-quotes within strings, because if you don't escape them quickly enough (or make a brief typo when doing so), you get the same issue.
You might notice that for other languages, such as C++, writing a string on one line (even with an uneven number of double-quotes) does not affect proceeding lines. Having this same behavior for VB would be great, assuming that there's some setting to enable it.
Yes its an inconvenience.
What I usually do is put some non-used character (e.g. some unused symbol on keyboard, or Alt+{some number}) instead of double quotes. When I'm done building my string whatever way I want, I just finalize it with either bringing up the Find and Replace box and replace that character with two double-quotes. Or just put a REPLACE statement immediately following it, replacing that character with Chr(34).
Instead use Chr(34), or if you end up repeating strings at all, store them as a resource.
I have to read the text from the cells of a column in excel and search for it in another sheet.
say for example, the text in sheet1 column A is "Evoked Potential Amplitude N2 - P2." This has to be searched in sheet2 column C. This fails because a question mark appears before the "E" which is not present in the value in the sheet2.
Both are representation of same character in different application. Maybe someone might recognize it.
In the excel sheet I don't see any junk characters, but while handling it in the vb code I see a question mark before the word - Evoke.
This data was extracted from a share point application and this character (?) is not visible to the plain eye. Search and replace functions are not working in this case.
Unicode 8203 is a zero-width space. I'm not sure where it's coming from. It is probably a flaw in the way the data is imported into Excel which you haven't noticed before, but it might be worth fixing.
In the meantime, you can simply use the Mid() function in Excel VBA to remove the unwanted character. For example instead of
x = cells(1,1).value
use
x = Mid(cells(1,1).value,2)
which deletes the first character.