In a word document, I'd like to find all semicolons that are surrounded by numbers. so I need the Find/Replace DialogBox to find and select ;
in 123;4
and 1;234
(but not example;example
or not example; example
) .
Please note that in the example above, I just need the semicolon selected for formatting.
I know the basics of RegEx but WORD's so called Wildcards are different. All I could do so far was to find the whole string (eg 123;4
) using ([0-9]{1,};[0-9]{1,})
but like I said I only need ;
so that I change it's font size, color etc.
Please help. I don't like to spend the whole day on a stupid document.
You can work around Microsoft Word's limitations by inserting a custom sequence of characters to mark the instances of ;
that you want to format, and then deleting the custom sequence of characters. In this example I will use the character sequence zzzzz
as this likely doesn't appear anywhere else in your document.
First do a find-and-replace:
Find what: ([0-9]{1,});([0-9]{1,})
Replace with: \1zzzzz;\2
Now you can select all instances of zzzzz;
and apply the desired format.
Lastly, do another find-and-replace:
Find what: zzzzz
Replace with: nothing