{"id":6418,"date":"2022-11-02T16:23:11","date_gmt":"2022-11-02T22:23:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/editorium.com\/archive\/?p=6418"},"modified":"2022-11-11T11:34:21","modified_gmt":"2022-11-11T18:34:21","slug":"wildcard-secrets-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/editorium.com\/archive\/wildcard-secrets-revisited\/","title":{"rendered":"Wildcard Secrets Revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago I sent out an article called "Three Wildcard Secrets." I thought they were pretty good secrets, too! You can see them here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In a nutshell, here are the first two:<\/p>\n

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The wildcard range [A-z], meant to find any uppercase or lowercase letter, will not find accented letters. You have to use [A-Za-z] instead. So I suggested using [!A-z] (not A-z) to find any characters that are<\/em> accented.<\/p>\n

Similarly, if you need to find any unspecified Unicode character, you can use the not range [!^000-^255]. That should work, as 255 is the upper limit on ANSI characters, so anything the range finds must be Unicode.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Then I received a corrective email from macro expert Paul Beverley. The nerve! Here's what Paul had to say about secret #1:<\/p>\n

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You see the problem? It did what you asked, not what you wanted. It finds any character at all, except A-z.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And Paul is right! The range [!A-z] finds not just accented characters but also spaces, punctuation, and other stuff that isn't letters\u2014something I knew if I'd actually thought about it. You can solve the problem by adding more things that you want to skip. Here's an example:<\/p>\n

[!A-z 0-9.,;:\\-\\?\\!^001-^064]<\/p>\n

(For more information, see my Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word<\/em><\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Next, Paul had this to say about secret #2:<\/p>\n

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On my PC [!^000-^255] throws up an error:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Now technically, I was right about the range being [!^000-^255]<\/a>. The problem is that Microsoft Word wants [!^001-^255] instead. And to make things even worse, that wildcard range correctly skips the ASCII characters (numbered 0-126) but incorrectly finds the extended ASCII characters (numbered 127-255), even though we've told it not to.<\/em> Microsoft strikes again!<\/p>\n

But wait, there's more!<\/p>\n