Outlook VBA find and add link; keeps skipping first hit - vba

Question

I'm a long-time beneficiary of the helpful advice folks on here have offered to others (sincere thanks, everyone), but this is my first time actually posting. My VBA skills are lackluster at best.
This is driving me nuts: I have an Outlook macro that's supposed to comb through an email message before it's sent and replace citations to our policy documents, all of which have a prefix of "A&P-" with a link to that document.
It actually works great, except that it stubbornly refuses to capture citations if they're the first word in the email. So, for example, if I have a list of entries that looks like this:
A&P-I-A-1-100, A&P-II-B-2-200, A&P-III-C-3-300
the script will add links to the second and third entry (and as many more as I want to add) but skip the first one entirely. Weirdly, if I add any characters at all to the start of the email (even just hitting the space bar a couple of times) this doesn't happen. It doesn't impact citations at the start of subsequent paragraphs either. Just that first word.
Here's the code I'm using. Any help very, very appreciated!:
Sub Citation3()
Dim myInspector As Outlook.Inspector
Dim myObject As Object
Dim myItem As Outlook.MailItem
Dim rngStory As Word.Range
Dim myDoc As Word.Document
Dim mySelection As Word.Selection
Dim strItem As String
Dim strItem2 As String
Dim strLink As String
Set myInspector = Application.ActiveInspector
Set myObject = myInspector.CurrentItem
Set myDoc = myInspector.WordEditor
Set mySelection = myDoc.Application.Selection
For Each rngStory In ActiveDocument.StoryRanges
With mySelection.Find
.ClearFormatting
.Text = "A&P-*-*-[0-9]{3}"
.Replacement.Text = ""
.Wrap = wdFindContinue
.MatchWildcards = True
If mySelection.Find.Execute = True Then
While mySelection.Find.Execute
strItem = mySelection.Text
strItem2 = Replace(strItem, "A&P", "AP")
mySelection.Hyperlinks.Add Anchor:=mySelection.Range, _
Address:="http://www.google.com/" & strItem2 & "_document.shtml", _
TextToDisplay:=strItem
End If
End With
Next rngStory
End Sub

Answer 1

The problem lines are:
If mySelection.Find.Execute = True Then
While mySelection.Find.Execute
When they're isolated like that, you can probably see what's happening.
You're doing one Execute in the If statement which finds the first occurrence of the pattern you're looking for and then immediately do another Execute in the While loop that now finds the second occurrence of that pattern, therefore ignoring the first match completely. After that, the code loops around the While loop and picks up any remaining matches correctly.
To fix this, simply remove the If and corresponding End If lines, because you don't need them. The While loop will take care of everything.
Now, for some observations.
In your code I don't see Next statement for your For Each loop, or a End With statement for your With block, or a Wend statement for your While loop, or a End Sub for that matter. I can only assume you've cut and pasted only selected bits of your code, so I'll ignore that.
You should probably indent your code a little better to make it easier on others (and on you!) to read and identify any potential errors.
Finally, I'm a little confused by your matching pattern: "A&P-*-*-[0-9]{3}". It would work equally well as "A&P*[0-9]{3}" or "A&P-*-*-*-[0-9]{3}". In the latter, note that there are 3 dashed bits of text between the P and the 3-digit number (according to your format specification for citations), whereas your original pattern only accounted for 2 dashed bits.