VBA getcrossreferenceitems(wdRefTypeNumberedItem) Paragraph Cut Off? - vba

Question

I'm using excel vba to extract information from a word document.
In the word document, there are levels of numbered lists. For example:
1. ABC
1.1 DEF
1.1.1 ABCDEF
2. AAA
2.1 BBB
2.1.1. CCC
and I need to get the full context of each heading in each level and put them into an excel range, i.e. {"1.ABC", "1.1 DEF", "1.1.1 ABCDEF", "2. AAA", "2.1 BBB", "2.1.1. CCC"}
The function I use is:
For Each sec In objDoc.getcrossreferenceitems(wdRefTypeNumberedItem)
However, my headings are truncated if the headings are too long. For example, I have (random text is added for confidentiality reasons):
"5.2.11. Current References: As part of the evaluation process, XXX will conduct 2340AERTQ3493YR. When selecting ADT34534FDGSR, please ensure that they are AERA34AEFDS."
But only
5.2.11. Current References: As part of the evaluation process, XXX will conduct 234
is displayed, and the rest of the sentence is gone.
If anybody has an alternate solution, please let me know.

Answer 1

i confirm this behavior. A workeable albeit and elaborate solution is to scan the document for all numbered items which gives you the full text and then cross reference that result against the list returned by the GetCrossReferenceItems. There's quite some work involved but works and gives you the ability to create one list with referable Headings and NumberedItems, which is what I did to build a more user friendly alternative to Word's own implementation.
You'll have to match the formatting Word applies to the list returned by GetCrossReferenceItems, ie. the identation and removal of special characters.
Be careful with track changes. There is a bug in GetCrossReferenceItems which means that items (in my case headers) that have a tracked change at the beginning of the text are not returned by GetCrossReferenceItems but internally are still on the list so the index is offset. If the item in question is item 11, then GetCrossReferenceItems gives the item belonging to item 12 the item 11. A workaround is to accept all revisions before GetCrossReferenceItems and undo it after.
It's not easy but works.

Answer 2

I met a similar problem in MSWord. I found some paragraph's text are shorten in the following code
Sub bug()
items = ActiveDocument.GetCrossReferenceItems(wdRefTypeNumberedItem)
For idx = 1 To UBound(items)
MsgBox items(idx)
Next
End Sub
I have to use a some long solution( in Python, sorry. But is is easy to rewrite in VBA):
varHeadings = []
for par in objDoc.Paragraph:
if par.Range.ListFormat.ListType == win32com.client.constants.wdListOutlineNumbering:
idx = par.Range.ListFormat.ListString
txt = par.Range.Text.strip('\n').strip('\r')
varHeadings.append('%s%s' % (idx, par.Range.Text))
which does work. However, as I have said, it is some tedious. So did I miss some VBA function in MSWord, or GetCrossReferenceItems has known bug and can not found any replacement in VBA?