Add XML markup to italic text sentence in MS Word

Question

I am up against a MS Word text formatting problem and wondered if there were any Regular Expression geeks who also use MS Word out there (unlikely, I know...)

I am trying to wrap a sentence that appears in italics in Word, using XML markup, e.g.

Text in italics

would become

<i>Text in italics</i>

I can do it for individual words, e.g.

<i>Text</i> <i>in</i> <i>italics</i>

but am having a tough time working out how to find the beginning and the end of a group of italicized text, rather than just individual words.

The only solution i have so far is to export the MS Word doc as wML and do the following:

<w:r w:rsidRPr="00FE6181">
                        <w:t>&lt;hi&gt;</w:t>
                    </w:r>
                    <w:r w:rsidR="00D555A7" w:rsidRPr="00D77C71">
                        <w:rPr>
                            <w:i/>
                        </w:rPr>
                        <w:t xml:space="preserve">Text in italics</w:t>
                    </w:r>
                    <w:r w:rsidRPr="00FE6181">
                        <w:t>&lt;</w:t>
                    </w:r>

and then reopen the doc in word. It's just a bit involved to roll out as a solution to a non-technical user.

It looks like this should be possible using RegExps (or maybe VBScript) I just don't know how to get there.

Any help appreciated

thanks

Answer 1

You should be able to do something like that with a VBA macro, using the FIND object.

ie

set find = WordApp.ActiveDocument.Contents.Range.Find

You'd specify the text to find as *

and then specify the formatting as italics. that would find all the text that's formatted with italics.

BUT... Here's the rub, if the user formatted a phrase in italics, they +might+ have formatted the whole phrase, or they might have formatted each word seperately, so you might "find" a single phrase, but you might find 3 seperate words each formatted italics.

To work around +that+ problem would be quite difficult.