Thanks very much. Although the actual explanations on the pages you
referred to are about as transparent as the Excel VBA Help files, I
was ultimately able to use them to cobble together some Regular
Expressions code that serves my purposes.


On Nov 29, 11:28*am, Gary''s Student
wrote:
There is a reference you can include for Regular expressions. *Once included:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...1x(VS.85).aspx
--
Gary''s Student - gsnu200816



"wal" wrote:
Excel 2003

I'm using Excel to compile customized lists of words for spelling
exercises. *I have several sheets with lists/tables of words. *I want
to extract from them words including, for example, the combination "a"
+ consonant + consonant (e.g., the word "back").

Thus far, I've been managing with simplewildcardsearches that find
the words on a given sheet and copy-paste them in a column on another
sheet. *E.g., search for the string "a??". *However, this gives
incorrect strings, like "bake", that I have to delete manually.

The basic code is:

Dim tXt As String
tXt = InputBox("Enter the string you want to find.", " ", , 0, 0)

With Worksheets(sHt).Range("a1:fb66")
* * Dim xx, firstAddress
* * Set xx = .Find(What:=tXt, [etc.])
* * If Not xx Is Nothing Then
* * * * firstAddress = xx.Address
* * * * Do
* * * * * * xx.Activate
* * * * * * Selection.Copy
* * * * * * Sheets("TempLists").Select
* * * * * * Selection.PasteSpecial Paste:=xlPasteValues
* * * * * * Application.CutCopyMode = False
* * * * * * ActiveCell.Offset(1, 0).Activate
* * * * * * Sheets(sHt).Select
* * * * * * Set xx = .FindNext(xx)
* * * * Loop While Not xx Is Nothing And xx.Address < firstAddress
* * End If
End With

To eliminate words I don't want, I tried creating a customwildcard
for the consonants, as follows:

Dim cc(1 To 19) As String
* * cc(1) = "b"
* * cc(2) = "c"
* * ...
* * cc(19) = "z"

Dim tXt As String

tXt = "a" & cc & cc *[followed by the With...End With code, above]

However, the "type mismatch" error occurs at the line immediately
above, with the & character highlighted. *Evidently, even though "a"
is a string and cc is a string, they can't be combined?

Any ideas for doing what I'm trying to do, even if they're totally
different from the code I've tried so far?

Thanks.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -