Complicated Microsoft word question it might be impossible

Thomas_Holding

Alderbank said:

I assume the non-English characters only occur in these special locations? If so,do a wildcard Find and Replace. 

Your “Find What” text needs to be:

(Æ)(*)(Ö)

That gives you three separate blocks of text which in Word shorthand are \1, \2 and \3. You just want the middle block so your Replace with text needs to be:

\2

And in the “Replace with:” box, select Format + Font + Italic

This works for me. Let us know if it works for you!

Thank you so much.
I would like to do something similar
I.e change

Example Text

to 

ÆExample TextÖ

Do you know how to do that?

Alderbank

In Find put Example Text. From dropdown box select 'Find whole words only'.

In Replace with put ÆExample TextÖ. 

This will change the whole phrase Example Text, but not the single words Example or Text if they occur separately.

Is that what you want?

Thomas_Holding

Alderbank said:

In Find put Example Text. From dropdown box select 'Find whole words only'.

In Replace with put ÆExample TextÖ. 

This will change the whole phrase Example Text, but not the single words Example or Text if they occur separately.

Is that what you want?

Thank you that is what I asked, unfortunately due to poor communication on my part. It is not exactly what I wanted.

I should have said that the text would change i.e so it would change something like this

 

Example Text

Wordsintitaics

More words completely different from the previous examples

All text in italics

 To

 

ÆExample TextÖ

ÆWordsintitaicsÖ

ÆMore words completely different from the previous examplesÖ

ÆAll text in italicsÖ

However there would be 100+ examples.
Does that make sense? Thanks again.

Alderbank

Sorry, it doesn't make any sense to me but I'm sure others might be able to figure out what you want.

You could be searching for some kind of mail merge where your hundreds of examples are in the form of a list or in fields but that may be beyond your present abilities with Word.

Have you considered doing a course in MSWord?

There are lots and lots including free ones online. I'm sure you would benefit and you will be amazed at what you and Word could do together.

GDB2222

If you often run into issues like this, you may want to spend a bit of time learning VBA.

Alderbank

I agree with @GDB2222's post above. ^^^

If I am right about what you are looking for, this macro posted in Superuser could be adapted to do what you want but it does require that programming knowledge

Using a list in excel to replace words in a word document 
https://superuser.com/questions/1476515/using-a-list-in-excel-to-replace-words-in-a-word-document-need-to-select-and-p

Heedtheadvice

It does seem that you might be making  thing complicated using  those characters....or possibly not if you are using them to delineate sections for actions!

As writ above some of the complicated things can be easy with VBA programming but that is quite advanced.

It might be a good idea to explain what you are doing what your aim is and why those characters are involved as sometimes you can go down a path that makes things over complicated....

Thomas_Holding

I have found a fix using python from a friend

import docx 

 

# Opening MS word document

doc_name ='test.docx'

doc = docx.Document(doc_name) 

 

#Filtering iltalicized text 

Italic_Text = '' 

for p in doc.paragraphs: 

    for run in p.runs: 

        if run.italic: 

            Italic_Text = Italic_Text + run.text + " " 

            #print (run.text)

            run.text ='Æ ' + run.text +' Ö'

            #print (run.text)

#Splitting text to a list of words 

Italic_Words =list(filter(None,Italic_Text.split(' '))) 

 

#Counting the number of italicized words 

counter = len(Italic_Words) 

print ("The number of Italic words is", str(counter))

doc.save('doc_name') 

Very easy thank you all for your help.